Small Business in the Peruvian Oil Industry: Lobitos Oilfields Limited Before 1934

For much of the twentieth century, the petroleum industry of Peru was dominated by the International Petroleum Company (or IPC), a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Yet IPC never obtained a monopoly. Other firms, such as Lobitos Oilfields Limited, a concern founded by British merchants, produced a significant amount of Peru's output. In this article, Professor Miller examines Lobitos's development from the time of the company's founding in 1900 through the pivotal year of 1934. Although the fortunes of Lobitos were closely linked to the pertubations of the international market and the shifting policies of the Peruvian government, corporate management enjoyed an unusual flexibility not only because the firm's interests were sometimes identical with those of its powerful rival IPC, but also because its merchant founders had established a vast trading network throughout South America. These additional factors allowed Lobitos to survive as a relatively small, unintegrated independent in an age of giant, fully-integrated multinationals.