HISTORY OF BUSINESS

Early history of Kraft Foods

2012-01-27T17:56:00.000-08:00

Kraft Foods is the second largest food and beverage company in the world. The history of Kraft goes back to 1903, with $65 in capital, a rented wagon and a horse name Paddy, James L. Kraft started selling cheese at Chicago’s Water Street.

His four brothers joined him in 1909, and they incorporated the fledging business as J. L. Kraft & Bros.

Kraft born in Ontario, Canada, in 1874 had emigrated to the United States, where he engaged in a variety of pursuits.

Kraft arrived in Chicago in 1903 with sixty dollars in his pocket. He bought a wagon and a horse to pull it, and fifty pounds of cheese, which he peddle on the streets.

The company quickly differentiated its cheeses though a marketing campaign touting the Kraft label.

Kraft used innovative and aggressive advertising techniques to promote his line of 31 varieties of cheese, becoming of the first food companies to use color advertisements in national magazines.

In 1914, the Kraft brothers opened their first cheese making plant in Stockton, Illinois. By that time it had extended its market area throughout the upper Midwest and into major eastern cities.

Until Kraft entered the business, cheese was produced in large wheels and had a tendency to spoil quickly when cut because most grocers and consumers had no access to refrigeration.

Thus problem inspired Kraft in 1915 to produce a blended, pasteurized cheese that he marketed in metal containers as “process cheese.”

By 1917, Kraft’s earnings were $2 million. The company rapidly expanded abroad opening an office in London (1924) and Germany (1927).

When the United States entered World War I, Kraft received a major contract to produce cheese in tins for the US army.

The company changed its name to Kraft Cheese Company in the 1900s soon after merging with the Phenix Cheese Corporation, the maker of Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese (introduced in the United States in 1872).

Kraft went public in 1924; four years later, it merged with Philadelphia cream cheese maker Phoenix.

In 1928 the company introduced Velveeta pasteurized processed cheese spread and Miracle Whip salad processing, adding Kraft caramels in 1933.

Kraft Foods is mainly known as a maker of cheese, biscuit and chilled processed meat. Coffee and beverages concentrates are only part of its business; however, Kraft is the leading company in hot drinks in the United States.

Early history of Kraft Foods

Boston Globe Newspaper

2012-01-19T20:41:00.000-08:00

The Boston Globe was founded in 1872 by six businessman. It was led by Eben Jordan, who jointly invested $150,000.

The first issue was published March 4, 1872 and cost four cents. The paper’s first year was disappointing, then in 1873 the investors were able to hire Colonel Charles H, Taylor, Civil War veteran to run the paper.

In 1877 the paper was purchased by Taylor. Under his leadership, it began publishing morning and evening editions, increased local and regional coverage, and introduced big headlines, especially on sensational story.

The Boston Globe has become one of the best respected daily newspaper in the United States.

In the 20th century, the paper began providing more national and international news while maintaining a generally liberal editorial stance.

The paper faced continuous financial difficulties and later sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 1981.

The Globe merged with the New York Times Company in October 1, 1993, which caused the largest newspaper merger and acquisition in American history.

Boston Globe Newspaper

Campbell Soup Company

2012-01-17T21:26:00.000-08:00

Campbell Soup Company is the largest soup maker in the world. The company also holds market-leading positions in Canada, Germany, France and Australia.

Joseph Campbell, fruit merchant who had been born in Bridgeton, and Abraham Anderson and icebox manufacturer, from Mount Holly, joined as a partners in a Camden tomato canning and preserving firm in 1869.

The company name Joseph Campbell Preserve Company to produce canned tomatoes, vegetables, jellies, soups, condiments and mincemeat.

They publicized their Beefsteak Tomatoes widely, using the trademark image so a gigantic tomato hoisted upon two men’s shoulders.

By 1894, Campbell and Anderson had both retired, leaving the company in the hands of new partner Arthur Dorrance.

Later in 1897, Dr. John T. Dorrance, Arthur’s nephew a chemist joined a company. In the same year, Dorrance invented condensed soup, a process that eliminated the water in canned soup. The process lowered the costs for packaging, shipping, and storage.

The popularity of condensed canned soup prompted the company to add the word soup to its name in 1922.

By 1911, Campbell was one of the first companies with national distribution and in 1915 it established its industry dominance by buying Franco-American , another soup maker.

The transformation of Campbell’s Soup into an icon of American culture was carefully guided by company publicists through the use do streetcar signs at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then with advertisements in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and sponsorship of the popular program on radio and television.

Campbell Soup Company

Early History of Google

2012-01-11T18:56:00.000-08:00

Google is an American public corporation founded by two students of Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in September 1998.

Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing. Both of his parents were computer scientists. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Russian mathematician and economist.

It all started with a research project intending to create a search engine that would analyze the relationship between websites and produce better rankings of results then the existing techniques.

According to Brin, the research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub, which was named for its ability to analyze the back links pointing to a site. This linkage information is used to rank Web pages and sites.

A couple of years later, they had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.

As the buzz about their project spread, more and more people began to use it. Soon they were reporting that there were 10,000 searches per day at on their system.

They named their successor search engine Google, in a whimsical analogy to the mathematical term googol, which is the immense large number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Page and Brin liked the name Google because it reflected their ‘mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite, amount of information available in the Web’.

Google is a play in the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirrota, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, to refer to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

In 1998, Google Inc. found its first office space at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, California. A friend sublet rooms to them that had a garage entrance. Larry and Sergey also hired their first employees, both the popular and industry press too notice and the praise began.

Google was also in the process of developing a unique company culture. It operated in an informal atmosphere that facilitated both collegiality and an easy exchange of ideas.

Within one year of its founding in 1998, Google, was handling 3 million search request a day.

In 1999, Google, received its first significant influx of capital, $25 million in venture capital financing from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield, and Byers, both located in Silicon Valley.

Google is now by far the world’s biggest search engine, representing 37.1 billion of all internet queries compared to 8,5 billion represented by Yahoo.

Early History of Google

Yataro Iwasaki (1835-1885) of Mitsubishi

2012-01-07T00:44:00.000-08:00

Yataro Iwasaki founded Mitsubishi in 1873. He was born on January 9, 1835, in the village of Inokuchi, near the southern coast of the island of Shikoku.

In 1867, Iwasaki was brought to work with Tosa Government’s trading office in Nagasaki. The next year he was transferred to Osaka. There he made more deals with foreign merchants exporting crops and importing weapons.

In 1870 Iwasaki took over Tosa’s debt of shipping company as his own. He renamed later in 1873 as Mitsubishi.

Mitsubishi began business with ten ships, With them the company entered the coastal trade edging out competitors by cutting edges.

The company got it first big break in 1874, when a competing shipping company refused a government request to transport munitions to Taiwan. Mitsubishi grabbed the opportunity and a year later the company received thirty ships form the government as a reward for its patriotism.

From the mid 1880s, Yataro Iwasaki began to diversify and it shift the focus of Mitsubishi’s business from shipping to heavy industry.

He began internalizing business that were complementary to shipping, and then spun off the internalized resources once they became independently capable of serviceable the main business.

When Iwasaki Yataro died, in 1885, his younger brother, Yanosuke, took over the Mitsubishi interest.

The new enterprise produced approximately 20 handmade Mitsubishi Model A passenger cars in 1917.

In 1946, the organization divided into 100 separate entities. Twelve years later Mitsubishi Trading established a division in the United States to export US goods and to import raw materials to Japan.

Yataro Iwasaki (1835-1885) of Mitsubishi

Baskin -Robbins

2012-01-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

Burton Baskin and Irvine Robbins, brothers-in-law who served in the military during World War II, were in the vanguard of the campaign to reinvent America’s favorite treat.

After being discharged from the armed forces, both decided to settle in California. In 1945 Irvine Robbins opened the Snowbird Cream Store in Glendale, while Baskin, opened and ice cream parlor called Burton’s in LA.

They soon owned six stores between them and began to sell franchises, reaching a total of 40 by 1949. Both Baskin and Robbins felt that on-site managers with a financial stake in the company would maintain the quality better.

The two formed a partnership in 1953 to create Baskin-Robbins in Pasadena, California., which sold premium ice cream.

By the mid 60s the company had more than four hundreds stores nationally. In 1953 the company advertised that its stores served thirty one flavors of ice cream.

Baskin -Robins

History of Unilever

2011-12-31T21:50:00.000-08:00

The company was formed by a merger of Dutch Margarine Union and British soap-makers Lever Brothers in 1929.

Unilever was one of the world’s first genuine multinationals with operating companies in more than 40 countries.

The company produces and distributes a vast number of well known brands in the areas of nutrition, hygiene and personal care that are used by consumers all over the world.

The history of Unilever dates back to 1885, William Lever established a soap manufacturing company in the UK with his brothers and named the company Lever Brothers in 1885.

William Hesketh Lever was born at Bolton, Lancashire in 1852 was the son of grocer. Together with James Lever, William Lever opened soap factory at Warrington, England, in 1885.

Their products, Sunlight, the world’s first packaged soap, was very successful. The soup they made in ready moulded tablet.

Previously laundry soap was marketed in bars and grocers cut off pieces and sold them by weight.

Until 1919 Lever was wholly own an controlled by the founder. By 1919, as a result of ingle minded expansionist, commercial policies, his firm accounted for 60 percent of soap production in Britain.

Two butter makers, Jurgen and Van den Berghs formed Margarine Union in 1927. The Dutch Margarine Union merged with Lever Brothers of United Kingdom in 1929 to form Unilever.

During the 1930s, the structure and management do Unilever has been describe as a professional largely non-family managed hierarchy.

For tax, purpose, two separate entities were established, one in London and another in Rotterdam.

Historically, Unilever has grown to be a very multilocal company. However, while the company used to work with regional supply chains on regional brands,

Unilever started to globalize their brands in the early and mid 1990s.

History of Unilever

The making of Chrysler

2011-12-21T22:22:00.000-08:00

The Chrysler Corporation, established in 1925, was the last of the ‘Big Three’ American producers to enter the automobile industry.

Chrysler was the reincarnation of the mid-sized Maxwell/Chalmers company. It was founded on June 6th 1925 by Walter P. Chrysler who had been chairman there since 1921.

Chrysler did not become readily apparent until June 24th , 1925 when on that date Maxwell stockholders transferred all of that corporations properties and other assets to Chrysler Corporation and voted the Maxwell Motor Corporation out of existence.

Chrysler became a major force on the American automobile industry in 1928, when it acquired Dodge Brothers , a company five times the of Chrysler and launched two entirely new car lines, Plymouth and DeSoto.

Chrysler established its own ‘college of engineering’ in 1931, when it launched the Chrysler Institute of Engineering’ with John J. Caton, the former head of the automotive engineering department at the University of Detroit, served as director of the institute.

The company ran very successfully and in 1936 it achieved an annual production of one million cars.

The making of Chrysler

History of Blackberry

2011-12-21T18:38:00.000-08:00

Among the mobile phone fruit names to set alongside apples and oranges was the Blackberry handset, renowned among businessmen as the most effective mobile email device. It was created by a Canadian company, Research In Motion.

Research In Motion began life in Waterloo, Ontario a s a two person tech start-up in a one room office. The founders were a 23 old college dropout named Mike Lazaridis and his friend Doug Fregin. Mike Lazaridis, then serves as its president and c0-CEO.

Back in 1999, Research In motion built the first reliable product to offer two way mobile e-mail and messaging.

However, at that time, many consumer were hesitant about purchasing a Blackberry because it didn’t offer multimedia functions such as a camera and audio playback.

In the days when the PalmPilot ruled the PDA world, RIM was busy in its lab, ignoring the then popular graffiti input method and designing a device with a QWERTY keyboard.

It also added an always connected e-mail capability, making this device a must have among government officials as well as finance and health professionals.

To meet the needs of government officials and industry professional, RIM made reliability, security and durability the priorities when manufacturing its devices.

It was Barrack Obama’s favorite mobile during the 2008 American presidential campaign.

In 2008 Research In Motion helped fuel the networking frenzy by partnering with MySpace to help connect networkers on the go.

By 2009, the Blackberry monopolizes the world of work nobody else comes close. An astounding 85 percent of public corporations are supplying staff with devices and more than 175000 Blackberry Enterprise Serves are installed worldwide.

History of Blackberry

The Creation of British Airways

2011-12-18T16:56:00.000-08:00

Today British Airways is the biggest airline company in the United Kingdom. It history can be traced it roots back to the start of civil aviation, where the forerunner to British Airways, Aircraft Transport and Travel Limited, launched the world’s first daily international schedule air service between London and Paris beginning on 25 August 1919.

The company that is now British Airways has had a varied history of merges and acquisitions.

In 1935, several small airlines offering services within the United Kingdom merged to form the original privately owned British Airways Limited.

In July 1939, a Bill was introduced to merge Imperial Airways and British Airways into a public corporation, British Overseas Airways Corporation, which actually came into being in April 1940, shortly before the Second World War.

British Overseas Airways Corporation introduced the word’s first jet airliner, the Comet in 1952, but had to withdraw it from service after three crashes in the next two years.

British Airways was formed on March 31, 1974, through the merger of the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA).

Since that time the company acquired Dan Air, and Brymon Airways.

Following 1994 it has since acquired Caledonian Airways. The airline was privatized on February 11, 1987.

The Creation of British Airways

Early history of General Electric Company

2011-12-11T18:00:00.001-08:00

In 1878 the Edison Electric Light Company was founded with the backing of J.P Morgan and Henry Villard, the leading Wall Street financiers of the time, with the objective of securing all discoveries and improvements resulting from Edison’s work on electric lighting.

Henry Villard, a German immigrant and self-made financier, purchased and merged the various Edison enterprise giving the inventor cash and stock and putting him on the board of directors as the new enterprise which was name the Edison General Electric Company.

The several Edison companies and the Sprague Electric Railway Company merged, incorporating officially in January 1889, to become Edison General Electric. It was formed to consolidated the separate but interlocking electrical companies controlled by Thomas A. Edison.

By 1890, Edison organized his various businesses into the Edison General Electric Company.

Another company the Thompson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts, acquired seven competitors between 1888 and 1890 and emerged with the majority of the arc lighting business, a clutch of key patents, and a large pool of skilled personnel.

Thomson-Houston Company was the chief competitors to the Edison General Electric Company. It was formed in 1883 and became a dominant electrical innovation company through a series of mergers led by Charles A. Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer from Lyn.

Thus in 1890 there were three large corporations in the electrical industry: Edison General Electric, Westinghouse and Thompson-Houston.

In 1892, as a result of a merger of the Edison General Electric Company and the Thomas-Houston Electric Company, General Electric Company was established.

The first General Electric plaices electric fans were produced at the Ft. Wayne electric works as early as the 189s, while a full line of heating and cooking devices were developed in 1907. The General Electric company become the world’s largest diversified manufacturer.

Early history of General Electric Company

Libby, McNeill & Libby

2011-12-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

Selling canned foods; in 1868, brothers Arthur and Charles Libby joined Archibald McNeill in a modest $3,000 business venture – producing beef in barrels.

In January 1875, they had broken with several traditional meat packing practices, they began curing beef with ice and employing the refrigerated box, enabled them to ship fresh meats to destination hundreds of miles from their plant.

Charles Libby died in 1895. Arthur died four years later. Neither did McNeil survive into the next century.

Their descendent did not follow them into the business. The company passed into the hands of the largest meat packer in the country, Swift & Company. Somewhere along the line, McNeill’s name was dropped.

The company began marketing canned sauerkraut in 1904 and in 1907 bottled A-1 sauce was introduced from England.

In 1907, McNeill & Libby started its first fruit cannery in Sunnyvale. It quickly became the largest employer with a predominantly female workforce.

In 1912 Libby, McNeill and Libby bought half of the stock of Hawaiian Cannery Co. By the 1930s, more that 12 million cases of pineapple were being produced in Hawaii every year. The lion’s share, Libby accounted for 23 percent.

Libby, McNeill Libby had entered the baby food business in the mid 1930s and offered a complete line of bay food fruits, vegetables, vegetable meat combinations and juices on a national basis for several years.

Libby discontinued its baby food line in 1960 due to the market share slip badly.

Nestle first acquired an interest in Libby in 1960 and over the years had increased its ownership to 61% primarily as a result of providing needed additional capital to Libby. In 1975m Nestle determined to acquire 100% ownership of Libby though a tender offer by Nestlé’s Subsidiary, Universal Food Specialties.
Libby, McNeill & Libby

Ukraine's Naftogaz gas company

2011-11-30T17:45:00.001-08:00

Ukraine is one of the world’s leading energy transit countries, with large oil and gas pipeline networks that transport Russian and Caspian Sea oil and gas across its territory.

Naftogaz was created in February 1998, as by ordered of the government, is a dominant player in most subsectors of the oil and gas industry in Ukraine.

Naftogaz or NAK Naftogaz Ukrayiny is vertically integrated company which owns and operates Ukrainian natural gas and oil transportation pipeline nest and extracts most of the gas within Ukraine.

Until the beginning of 2006, Naftogaz of Ukraine also handled all gas imports into the country.

The gas crisis in the winter 2005-06, Russian briefly cut the gas supply for Ukraine’s use in a dispute over payments. To resolve the dispute UkrGazEnergo was established, with an arrangement that it could by 34 bcm of gas in 2006 for RosUkrEnergo rising to 58 bcm per years starting in 2007.

This ended the previous arrangement whereby all gas brought in across the border went to Naftogaz, thereby breaking its distribution monopoly.
Ukraine's Naftogaz gas company

New York Times newspaper

2011-11-23T02:27:00.001-08:00

The New York Times was created and published its first issue in 1851. The founder was Henry Jarvis Raymond.

Henry Jarvis Raymond worked first with the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley. However, after a personal dispute with Greeley, Raymond left the Tribune.

In 1851 he and George Jones founded the New York Times with capital sum of $100,000.

Raymond proposed to cover all the news of the day with special attention to legal, criminal, commercial and financial transactions in the City of New York, to political and personal movements in all parts of the United States.

He reported extensively on the post-war South and on the Congressional debates on reconstruction: and secured an ‘on-the-record’ interview with President Johnson.

He intended the Times to be enlightened and descent; the best and the cheapest daily family newspaper in the United States.

It was soon ranked among the leading journals of the country. Henry Raymond who was born at Lima New York in 1820 was elected lieutenant-governor of New York 1854 and was active in support to Fremont for president in 1856 and of Lincoln in 1860.

The New York Times newspaper is the most important property of the New York Times Company, incorporated in 1896 as successor to the New York Times Publishing Company.

Raymond died in 1869. Control over the paper passed briefly in the 1890s to its editor-in-chief Charles Miller and then to Adolph Simon Ochs. It was under Ochs that the newspaper really achieved international prominence.
New York Times newspaper

Gazprom gas company

2011-11-15T23:51:00.001-08:00

The energy industry in Russia, production and trade remain regulated by 100 percent state orders until as late as 1991.

Founded in 1989, Gazprom has become largest natural gas company on the globe, holding almost 20 percent of the world’s total natural gas reserves and exporting to over 30 countries, primarily the European Union and eastern Europe.

Gazprom produces around 84% of all Russia’s natural gas, controls almost all gas exports, supplies gas for the generation of close to 50% of the country’s electricity and operates its own natural gas pipeline grid.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Gazprom lost a large part of its asset outside of Russia, but when Boris Yeltsin appointed Chernomyrdin as prime minister in December 1992, the influence of Gazprom increased markedly.

Victor Chernomyrdin was one of the proponent of a special gas concern, who had been Minister of the old Gas Ministry.

With the government committed to economic reform Gazprom began to be privatized in November 1992, under the voucher methods of privatization.

Since 2002, Gazprom has managed the transport Central Asia Center gas pipeline in western Uzbekistan that are used to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to external markets.

Its major shareholder is the Russian government, but since 1996 its share have been traded on the Moscow stock exchange. In December 2005, the limit for private ownership of its capital was increased to just below 50%.
Gazprom gas company

History of Qantas

2011-11-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Qantas was established in 1920. Now the Qantas group operated two major brands (Qantas and Jetstar) and is the largest Australian domestic and international Airline.

It has grown from a small outback carrier to arguably the world’s best international airline.

It was in 16 November 1920 the certificate of incorporation was given under seal at Brisbane for ‘Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd.’ Its initials provided the name QANTAS.

Three founders of Qantas were Paul McGuiness, Fergus McMaster and Hudson Fysh. The first chairman of airline was Fergus McMaster.

It is the second oldest airline in the world, after KLM, the Dutch airline. Qantas also was a long-haul route pioneer and the first airline to introduced Business class in 1979.

Qantas as a pioneer airline in Australia, it grew by internalization in early years. It began to develop an international network from the 1930s onwards.

In 1934, Qantas and Imperial Airways jointly established Qantas Empire Airways Ltd. After the regulation of the Australian airline industry in 1990, the Australian government decided to fully privatize the company in 1992. The privatization was completed in 1995.

In the wake of 9/11, Qantas was one of the few network airlines that remains profitable. The strongest growth in passenger numbers occurred in 2001 driven by the collapse of Ansett Australia.
History of Qantas

Early History of oil

2011-11-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

Petroleum derivatives have been exploited since the emergence of human civilization, particularly in ancient Mesopotamia and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Oil and its by product have been a useful commodity since around 5000 BC. Its use as a weapon was recorded in the East Roman Empire in 650 AD, while in medieval Europe oil was used for medical purposes, lubricants and paint fabrication.

Up to the beginning of the 19th century no oil seems to have been obtained except from the surfaces of springs and streams.

People were already familiar with oil because some oil deposits were close enough to the surface that oil would sometimes seep into ground. And drillers in search of water would sometimes strike oil by accident.

Early explorer of the Allegheny and its tributes tell of springs and streams the surface of which were found covered with a thick oily substance which burned fiercely when ignited and which the Indians believed to have curative properties.

Naturally the first use made of the oil obtained in qualities from the salt wells was medicinal.

The great revolution occurred in Pennsylvania in 1859, when Edwin Drake first succeeded in extracting oil from its rocky underground prison with a drilling machine.

In August 28, 1859, Drake succeed ins striking oil with the new method of extraction.

His discovery quickly led to the world’s first oil boom. The oil that Drake had uncovered was large and rich, and although his first well was not so productive when measured in barrels produced.

In 1878, the invention of the oil stove was to have an important effect on the petroleum industry, the stove became a commercial success following the World Fair in Pairs, leading to a sharp increase in the demand for fuel oil.
Early History of oil

Early History of Dresdner Bank

2011-11-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

Early 1870s to the twentieth century, large scale German industrial enterprise depended more heavily on external finance, a particularly as represented by the capital markets.

Dresdner Bank was established during 18th century by the conversion of the Dresden private bank Michael Kaskel.

Kaskel was one of the very few successors of former court Jews who successfully transformed their business not only into state financing, but also towards granting credits to modern industry and transport.

The creation of Dresdner bank through a consortium of banks started trading in December 1872 and then was listed in the Berlin stock exchange in January 1873 – becoming a public company.

Dresdner Bank was the first West German Bank, indeed the first West German firm, to open an office in its home city of Dresden.

In 1881, Dresdner opened a branch in Berlin, which became its head office in 1884.

By 1910, Dresdner Bank were among six banks in Germany to posses more than 100 million marks in capital.

Dresdner Bank played a role in Russia before the First World War, in a particular in the financing of railways, mechanical and electrical engineering. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Dresdner Bank participate in the reactivation of financial relations between Germany and Russia.

Dresdner acquired Kleinwort Benson, the British merchant bank in 1996, and also expanded its investment banking activities in the USA with the acquisition of Wasserstein Perella.

In 2008, Dresdner Bank employed 27,597 people and managed to establish a total of €500 billion. This makes the Dresdner Bank the third biggest in Germany.

In May 2009 Dresdner Bank merged with Commerzebank became the second largest bank in Germany, just after Deutsche Bank.
Early History of Dresdner Bank

History of Citibank

2011-10-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

Citibank was established in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, a state chartered bank.

By the end of the 19th century the bank had grown to become the largest bank in the United States and the first to establish a foreign trading departments.

After the Panic of 1837, Moses Taylor a wealthy merchant acquired a controlling interest in the bank, holding it presidency from 1858 until he died in 1882, to be succeeded by his son in law, Percy Pyne.

Taylor and Pyne pursued policies of strong liquidity and high cash reserves, enabling the institution – re-chartered in 1865 as the National City Bank of New York.

In 1914 the bank established its first overseas office in Buenos Aires, Argentina and shortly thereafter began to aggressively expand across South America and Asia.

In 1929, Citibank became the largest bank in the world.

By 1967 it had 148 direct foreign branches on forty-two countries and 93 bank subsidiaries or affiliates in twenty one countries.

Later renamed Citibank NA in 1976, it recoup its international position, opening or reopening branches in every major overseas country.

Citibank expanded its credit card fees and interest revenue in 1981 by acquiring the Diners Club, membership in which permitted New Yorkers and others in big Eastern cities to eat at restaurants without carrying cash.

By the early 1990s, Citibank had grown to more than 3,400 branches in 100 countries and was considered the world’s most global bank.

In April of 1988, Citibank announced that it was merging with Travelers group, Inc, which owned Salomon Brothers and Smith Barneys. The value of this merger was set at $83 billion. The combined firm’s holding company became Citigroup, Inc.
History of Citibank

The History of Major Credit Card

2011-10-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

If plastic emerged as the king of manufacturing materials after World War 11, the idea of credit had come about much earlier, rising to preeminence during the Italian renaissance.

In 1950, however, plastic and credit came together to produce something brand new in the world: the major credit card.

As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, some American hotels began offering customer cards they could use to charge their room and some other hotel services.

This was not only convenient for the customer; it worked to keep patrons coming back to the same hotel.

By the era of World War 1, a good many urban department stores started issuing “charge plates” to select customers.

These thin metal plates were embossed with the customer’s name and used to imprint receipts for merchandise purchased on credit. Charge plates became so pervasive that the term charge plate was often applied even to the later plastic cards.

Finally, by 1924, gas station affiliated with national oil companies began issuing credit cards which were usable in any gas station affiliated with the oil company that had issued the card.

McNamara ran Hamilton Finance, a small loan company in New York City. One of his customers had a great many department store charge accounts and made a practice of lending his cards to friends, whom he would charge for the use of them.

He borrowed finds from McNamara (who knew nothing of his customer’s scheme) to pay off the outstanding debt accumulated on the cards, then pocketed the profits when his “customers” paid him.

It was a nice way to pick up some extra cash – until one of his clients turned deadbeat, stiffed him, and prompted him, in turn to default on a loan from McNamara.

McNamara began to think: instead of lending a fistful of cards to a bunch of people, why not create a single card that could be used in many different places and then market that card to a large number of people?

In February 1950, McNamara and his other friend jointly opened an office in the Empire State Building and quickly persuaded a small number of New York City restaurants to serve meals on credit, to members of what they dubbed the Diners Club.
The History of Major Credit Card

History of BMW in USA

2011-10-18T06:44:00.001-07:00

Max Hoffman who play a key role in the growth of the German car industry in North America for the next quarter century, loved the prewar BMWs.

He recognized the strength of the American economy as a lifeline for struggling German car manufacturers.

He imported V8 502s to his Manhattan dealership, but they were slow to sell. Only a sports car the fast and eye catching 507, which was shown at the Frankfurt Motor Show in 1955, drew praise.

It was slightly revised in 1958 with the appearance of the Series II, which offered increased horsepower, standard front disc brakes, and added space behind the seats.

By the 1980s, BMW was the consumer brand most identified with rich free spending yuppies. The compact Three Series, launched in 1982, was a yuppies dream car.

It was the brand of dreams, After the mid-1980s, every car marquee in the world aspired to BMW like status and BMW became everyone’s benchmark.

In the 1990s BMW sought to move from its role as a German-made symbol of yuppie affluence to a global luxury brand offering the ‘ultimate driving machine’. The company’s sweeping changes including opening it s first factory in the United States.

In 1992, BMW announced it would locate its first ever manufacturing facility outside Germany in Spartanburg County.

In the year of 2006, sales of the BMW brand worldwide, at nearly 1,2 million vehicles. BMW’’s home is in Munich, Germany, It only stared producing vehicles in the USA in 1992.

In 2010, BMW announced that it would spend $750 million to expand the production facilities in order to produce 240,oo vehicles.
History of BMW in USA

History of McDonnell Douglas

2011-10-11T18:54:00.001-07:00

Major United States aircraft manufacturer, James S. McDonnell (1899-1980) founded the company in 1939 after working several firms including Stout, Hamilton and Martin.

The company was intended to focus on military production of aircraft and parts.

Donald Douglas Wills graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with aeronautical engineering founded the Davis-Douglas Company in California in 1920 to built an aircraft.

He renamed the company Douglas Aircraft Company and in 1924 a team of US Army personnel made the first round the world flight in specially designed Douglas World Cruisers, a feat which boosted Douglas’s reputation.

Douglas Aircraft Company’s heritage began in 1925 with the delivery of the C-1, the first United States aircraft designed as a logistic transport, to the Army Air Service.

Both McDonnell and Douglas contribute to the war effort, but were short of work with the end of hostilities.

McDonnell took over Douglass aircraft in 1967, becoming McDonnell Douglas. The company produced fighter aircraft – such as F-4 Phantom II and later the F15 Eagle for combat as well as missile technology and civilian aircraft – such as MD series of commercial airliners.

McDonnell Douglas MD-80 and MD-90 is the fascinating story of the family of airliners which has served with over 40 airliners around the globe.

In 1975, McDonnell was selected over E-System as the contractor for guidance systems for the forthcoming cruise missile , a contract which will generate substantial income for the 1980s.

McDonnell also entered into cooperation with Northrop to develop a lightweight fighter, the F-18 for the Navy.

McDonnell Douglass designed, developed and produced the industry’s first military transports and the first tanker aircraft.

After the takeover of MacDonnell Douglass by Boeing in August 1997, both are continuing to operate as divisions of the Seattle based manufacturer.
History of McDonnell Douglas

Bank of America

2011-10-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

Citizens National Bank became Interfirst, then First Republic, and later NCNB. In 1992, the bank took the name NationsBank, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Subsequent acquisition soon made it the largest bank in the American south.

Bank of America was originally formed out of several small southern Californian banks in the early 1900s, but a more important predecessor was Amadio Giannini’s Bank of Italy, which acquired Bank of America and its name in 1929.

The combined company was headed by Amadio Giannini with Orra E. Monnette serving as co-Chair.

In October 1998, the merger of NationsBank and Bank of America created the nation’s first coast to coast bank, with $618 billion in assets.

While the deal was technically a purchase of BankAmerica Corporation by NationsBank, the deal was structured as merger with NationsBank renamed to Bank of America Corporation.
Bank of America is the second largest bank in the US by assets after Newsgroup.

The post 1998 group has made further acquisition, including MBNA in 2005 by which Bank of America became the country’s largest credit card user.

An even larger combination came in late 2003, when Bank of America announced it was entering into a $49 billion stock-for-stock merger agreement with FleetBoston Financial creating the second biggest bank in the United States. The merger completed in April 2004.

In 2008, Bank of America bought the investment firm Merrill Lynch, today it one of the three banking corporations control about one third of all the nations banking assets.
Bank of America

History of Commerzbank

2011-09-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

Commerzbank was founded on 26 February 1870 on the initiative of Theodor Wille, a Hamburg international merchant.

Wille formed a committee of businessmen, merchant bankers and private bankers from Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and New York.

The new institution went by the name of Commerz-und Disconto-Bank in Hamburg. It was formed with their initial purpose being to finance trade in the Hamburg area.

The bank operated from the start as industrial banks, taking deposits, extending loans, underwriting new issues on the stock mallet and engaging in trade finance.

As a major bank, Commerzbank provided a mix of services that greatly facilitated the emergence of large scale industrial organization in Germany. This mix changed over tine in response to shifting needs and structures.

Commerzbank did not reach a leading position before its mergers with Mitteldeutsche Privat-Bank in 1920, and then with Mitteldeutsche Credit banks in 1929.

During Second World War, throughout what was Germany, including parts that were in 1945 ceded to Poland, Commerzbank had 300 branches.

By early 1980s, Commerzbank had braches in London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels and New York.

It was described as one of the Germany’s leading banks and the fifth largest banks in the world.
History of Commerzbank

The Early History of iPhone

2011-09-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

Apple has had a vision for a powerful mobile device like iPhone for many years. In August 1993, Apple announced the Newton MessagePad, a device that marked Apple’s entry into the market of personal digital assistants.

The history of the iPhone began with Steve Jobs’ direction that Apple engineers investigate touch screen.

At that time he had been considering having Apple work on tablet PCs. Like Newton MessagePad, the iPhone is nearly all screen.

In January 2007, Apple turned the smartphone upside down when it officially announced the 1st generation iPhone.

The 1st generation iPhone connected to a wireless network and applications were delivered to the user over the mobile version of Safari.

The first iPhone was referred to as the 2G. The 2G iPhone was capable of using the second-generation cellular network Edge. The Apple 2G iPhone was first released with 4G of internal storage and then released in September 2007 with 8GB and 16GB versions.

According to Steve Jobs,” "The quality and the sophistication of the applications you can write for the iPhone is in a different class," which he thinks should help the iPhone succeed where his line of Mac computers failed against Windows PC.

By releasing this new generation of iPhone Steve Jobs will be making an attempt to dominate the next generation of computing as it moves toward internet-connected mobile devices.

Third generation (3G) phones were the first to cross a telephone and a handheld computer, with a built –in web browser and e-mail service.

3G networks boast broadband transmission speeds of 1-3 million bits per second, enough to send full color motion pictures through the phone.

It also will offer more than 500 software applications, including games, educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools, may be a far more important development than the iPhone 3G, which goes on sale at the same time.

Apple had a history of trials an failures until the release of the iPhone, which is the phone that actually changed the mobile phone game.
The Early History of iPhone