Weatherford Brand Guidelines: A 1941 Texas Spring Shop, 300 Deals & a 2019 Chapter 11

A cementing inventor in a Texas town.

Weatherford takes its name from a town, not a person. English Wikipedia traces the company’s roots to Weatherford, Texas, where Jesse E. Hall Sr. began manufacturing around 1941 as a sole proprietor under the trade name Weatherford Spring Company. Hall is described there as the inventor of the spiral centralizer and the casing scratcher, two tools used in oil-well cementing: the steel casing that lines a well has to sit centred in the hole, with clean walls, if the cement pumped around it is to bond.

The business changed hands within the family seven years later. In September 1948, Wikipedia says, Hall Sr. sold it at book value to a corporation in which his son Jesse E. Hall Jr. held half the shares and his brothers George, John and Elmer Hall held the rest. A new Texas corporation formed on 15 December 1948 took over the business, and Hall Sr. kept no ownership after that. The new company was Weatherford Oil Tool Company, Inc., with Hall Jr. as its president until he retired. German Wikipedia gives 1948, the year of that corporation, as the founding date of the company, in the town of Weatherford, so the two accounts differ only on which date counts as the start.

That small Texas toolmaker is the root of the name, but not of the corporate line that carries it today, which came from an unrelated company decades later.

Energy Ventures, EVI and 300 acquisitions.

The company that now trades as Weatherford was, in corporate terms, built from a different starting point. English Wikipedia dates Weatherford International to 1987 and says it began as Energy Ventures, an exploration and production company created in 1972 and traded over the counter with a small market value. Bernard J. Duroc-Danner was hired to start oilfield service and equipment operations. The company became EVI in 1990 and took the name Weatherford International in 1998. Wikipedia describes the modern group as the consolidation of more than 300 acquisitions since its establishment.

Growth came fast in the following decade. Between 1999 and 2008, Wikipedia says, Weatherford built its service business through acquisitions and organic growth, with a strategy focused on mature fields — older oil and gas fields where producers try to recover more from existing wells. In 2001 it separated its tubulars business from its core work; the drill-pipe maker Grant Prideco had been a Weatherford subsidiary from 1990 to 2000.

The company also moved its legal home several times. In 2008 it announced a move of its place of incorporation from Bermuda to Switzerland; German Wikipedia dates the completed move to Zug to 26 February 2009 and records a listing on the SIX Swiss Exchange from 17 November 2010. In April 2014 the board approved a move of its legal domicile to Ireland; German Wikipedia says the Irish registration took effect in June 2014 and that the shares left the Swiss and Paris exchanges that month. English Wikipedia gives the operational office as Houston.

Its range today covers the life of a well. Its website groups the business into drilling and evaluation, well construction and completions, and production and intervention, and names technologies such as the Centro well construction optimisation platform, the Magnus rotary steerable system, the Victus intelligent managed pressure drilling system and the RipTide drilling reamer.

How oilfield service companies present themselves.

Oilfield service companies sell work that most people never see. Their customers are oil and gas producers, and the jobs happen thousands of metres underground, on remote well pads or on the seabed. So the way these firms present themselves leans on a small set of recurring pictures: crews in branded coveralls and hard hats on a rig floor, frac fleets of pump trucks lined up on a well pad, and service trucks parked at a wellsite with the company name on the door.

Offshore, the pictures change but the method is the same. Remotely operated vehicles hang from launch frames, supply and support vessels sit in a harbour or alongside a platform, and seismic ships tow their streamers across open water. Onshore and offshore alike, the firms photograph their engineering and manufacturing centres too: test bays, laboratories and workshops where pumps, tools and chemicals are made or checked before they go to the field.

Much of the communication is technical. Companies publish papers through industry bodies, case studies that set out a customer’s problem and the tool used to solve it, product data sheets and long catalogues of named technologies. Product names tend to be coined words or trademarks attached to a function — a drilling system, a lift pump, a monitoring service — and many firms keep the names of companies they bought alive as product brands.

Two further registers sit alongside the technical one. Safety pages describe procedures, training and reporting in the industry’s own vocabulary, and investor presentations explain backlogs, contracts and market cycles to shareholders. For many of these firms, mergers, spin-offs and restructurings are part of the history, so the name on the coveralls may be newer than the tools the crew is using.

Chapter 11 in 2019, Nasdaq in 2021.

The company went through a court restructuring at the end of the 2010s. On 3 July 2019, World Oil reported that Weatherford International plc, Weatherford International Ltd. and Weatherford International, LLC had started voluntary cases under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code to carry out a “pre-packaged” plan of reorganisation, agreed with creditors in advance; the company’s other entities and affiliates were not included, and it said it also expected to file proceedings in Bermuda and Ireland. The announcement was datelined Baar, in Switzerland. English Wikipedia says the cases were filed in the Southern District of Texas and that in December 2019 Weatherford announced it had completed the restructuring and emerged from Chapter 11, with its long-term debt much reduced.

Leadership changed again after the restructuring. Wikipedia says the board named Girish K. Saligram president and chief executive with effect from 12 October 2020. On 1 June 2021 the company announced that Nasdaq had approved the relisting of its ordinary shares under the ticker WFRD, with trading from 2 June 2021, after a period in which they traded over the counter.

Its record also includes sanctions questions. English Wikipedia reports that the United States alleged that Weatherford and a subsidiary sold products including U.S. goods to Cuba, and that after media and investor criticism in 2007 over a foreign subsidiary’s work in Sudan, the company said it would divest operations in countries under U.S. sanctions and withdrew from Sudan the following year. The sources used for this guide do not say how those allegations were finally resolved.

For a design guide, Weatherford shows how a company name can carry a place and an early tool long after the company behind it has been rebuilt through acquisitions and a restructuring. Compare Halliburton, another service company that began in oil-well cementing, and Baker Hughes, a group whose name joins two early toolmakers. For this guide we use a casing blue, a cement grey and a rust accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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