Total S.A. ( , ) is an oil company headquartered in Paris, France, and one of the six "Supermajor" oil companies in the world. Its businesses cover the entire oil and gas chain, from crude oil and natural gas exploration and production to power generation, transportation, refining, petroleum product marketing, and international crude oil and product trading. Total is also a large-scale chemicals manufacturer.
Rejecting the idea of partnering with Royal Dutch Shell, French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré insisted after World War I that France create an entirely French oil company. At Poincaré's behest, Col. Ernest Mercier, a graduate of the École Polytechnique expert in the electric industry, enlisted the support of ninety banks and companies to found Total on March 28, 1924, as the Compagnie française des pétroles (CFP), literally the "French Company of Petroleums". Petroleum was seen as vital in the case of a new war with Germany. However, the company was from the start a private sector company (it was listed on the Paris Stock Exchange for the first time in 1929). CFP took up the 23.75% share of Deutsche Bank in the Turkish Petroleum Company (renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company), awarded to France as compensation for war damages caused by Germany during World War I by the San Remo conference.
In 1985 the company was renamed Total CFP. In 1991 the company name became simply Total. After Total's takeover of Petrofina in 1999, it became known as Total Fina. Afterwards it also acquired Elf Aquitaine. First named TotalFinaElf after the merger in 2000, it was later renamed back to Total in 2003.
Total operates in more than 130 countries and has over 111,000 employees. As recently as 1992, the French government still held 5% of the firm's shares, down from a peak of over thirty percent. In the time period between 1990 and 1994, foreign ownership of the firm increased from 23% to 44%.
==cIn the UK it has been noted that in 2008 it has adopted a bold and acclaimed recruitment strategy in terms of ensuring its current staff meet Home Office Regulations by conducting a vc
