John D Rockefeller Industrial Integration Essay

1454 Words3 Pages

$650 billion dollars is the combined net worth of Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller if they were alive today. That is almost 8 times the net worth of Bill Gates. Carnegie in the late 1800’s had almost total control over the steel industry in America. Similarly, Rockefeller had a monopoly on oil, and petroleum products. The reason that they were able to become so dominant was because of integration. There are a few types of integration that all contribute to the success of a company. Integration can help eliminate competition, take control over raw materials, merge companies, and control the price of the product based on the quality or on the price of competition’s product. Integration was the main reason that they became as successful …show more content…

Integration allowed them to take control of the product at the source and kept it from being sold to other companies who competed against them. So not only did having control of raw materials make the product cost less to produce it also limited the competition which is part of horizontal integration. Without his holding company Rockefeller would not have been able to purchase Carnegie Steel Co and he also would not have the funds to pay it. Since Andrew Carnegie was so brilliant at making his product cheaper he was able to beat out his competition by making a high quality product for a less expensive price.

Although Carnegie & Rockefeller were both successful through strict types of integration, George Pullman took another approach to the idea of integration by making a whole town. Pullman is a neighborhood in Chicago where George Pullman ran a town full of the people that worked for him. Although this is not a strict form of integration Pullman took his workers off the market so other companies could not snag them from him. By doing this he insured that all the money from his workers paychecks would go straight back to him since all his workers were required to live in

Open Document