ExxonMobil Corp. shareholders loved Lee Raymond, the chairman and chief executive who has his own encyclopedia entry and has run a company with an annual budget larger than that of many countries. During 66-year-old Raymond's 42-year career with the supermajor that included 21 years as a director, it has consistently produced shareholder returns. He retired December 31. Rex Tillerson, 53 and who joined Exxon in 1975, is now in the chairman and CEO seat. Raymond's career included the industry's movement into the brutal North Sea and prolific Alaska, the Arab oil embargo, nationalization of some important oil assets, such as in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, the Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster, Russia's collapse, an oil-price collapse, and the takeover of Mobil Corp. The merger with Mobil has contributed to ExxonMobil's ranking as the world's largest public company, in terms of market cap-currently some $400 billion. "Lee Raymond's history with ExxonMobil covers the entire modern oil era," report Paul Sankey and Adam Sieminski, analysts with Deutsche Bank in a recent review of the company. In what shape does Raymond leave ExxonMobil and where to from here? "From a corporate perspective, ExxonMobil seems in extremely good shape, with major identifiable growth drivers over the next five years-West Africa, Sakhalin, Qatar-yet sufficient free cash flow to drive a huge buyback program," the analysts write. "The biggest relative weaknesses in the current XOM: dividend yield at an all-time low; per-barrel-of-production capex at an all-time high... and it is at half its peak size of some 8 million barrels per day of production in 1970." Current production is some 4 million barrels per day. For more on this, see the February issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-993-9325, ext. 129.