Fortune Profile One of the most legendary figures in American business, Armand Hammer was once called the "God of Business" and "God of Luck". He became the first American millionaire in college, then became a trade agent for the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and was known around the world for his deep friendship with political leaders in both the East and the West.
Some people say he is the communication between the East and West trade "peace messenger", some people praise him is proficient in all walks of life "all-purpose businessman", and some people marvel that he is a magic "business elf! Armand Hammer, a university student, is a "peacemaker". Armand Hammer, an American businessman who became a millionaire in his college days, was cordially received by Lenin; established friendship with Khrushchev and Brezhnev; was a bosom friend of the King of Libya; was in close contact with U.S. Presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon; and was invited by Deng Xiaoping personally to visit China... ...Hammer's life, like a poem, like a mystery, more like a brilliant book, his story, is a presentation of the storm clouds of the times Yamon Hammer is the chairman of the U.S. Occidental Petroleum Corporation, is a rather legendary figure. In the West, he was a millionaire who made gold out of stone, while in the Soviet Union and China, he was a household name as a "red capitalist" because he was the first Western entrepreneur to cooperate with the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, and was affectionately called "Comrade Hammer" by Lenin; and he was the first person to visit China on a private plane. He was the first Western entrepreneur to visit China on a private jet, and was hailed by Deng Xiaoping as a "courageous man", while "Hammer's Autobiography" became a popular bestseller in China.
Hammer, a descendant of Russian immigrants, was born on May 21, 1898, in New York City. His great-grandfather, Vladimir, was a Russian Jew who became wealthy as a shipbuilder under Czar Nicholas I. He was born in New York City in 1898. By the time Hammer's grandfather Jacob married and had children, a typhoon caused a tsunami that wiped out the family fortune, and in 1875 Jacob moved to the United States with his wife and son Julius. When Julius reached the age of 15, he gave up his education and went to work as a foundryman in a steel mill to supplement his family's income. He was young and strong and became a prominent figure among the workers. He joined the Socialist Labor Party, organized trade unions, and became an active socialist, Julius was 19 when he applied for a job as a pharmacist. After a few years, he used his saved wages to buy the owner's drugstore, and later opened two more branches and a pharmaceutical factory. And just like that, the young socialist became a young capitalist. However, Julius did not give up his beliefs and remained a devoted follower of the socialist movement in the U.S. On a socialist outing in 1897, Julius fell in love at first sight with Rose, a young widow, and soon married. A year later, they had their first child, whom Julius named Ammon Hammer, allegedly after the Socialist Labor Party's emblem, the Arm and Hammer.
Just four months after Hammer's birth, his father, Julius, enrolled in Columbia Medical School. For the next four years, Julius ran a drugstore and pharmacy as well as pursued his medical program, but true to form, he managed both his studies and his career, finally graduating in 1902. That achievement was achieved in a way that would later influence Hamer's growth.
Julius, believing that healing the sick and saving lives was more noble than making money by trading, took the plunge and sold his drugstore and pharmaceutical factory, set up a clinic in the Bronx area of New York City, and became a doctor. In his lifetime of practicing medicine, he has saved the lives of more than 5,000 babies.
The children grew up under their father's tutelage. Hammer was the least obedient of the three brothers, but also the most creative. He skipped school, and after his father's education, he changed, rising from middle-of-the-road to first in his studies, and learning to fiddle with radios and build model airplanes outside of school, and winning a gold medal in his high school's valedictorian speech contest. In addition, he was also obsessed with such as Rockefeller, Carnegie and other famous entrepreneurs from scratch biography of the United States, began to look around the door to make money. 16 years old, he was in high school, he succeeded in doing the first "big deal". One day he saw an old two-seater convertible at auction on Broadway and was determined to buy it. He borrowed money from his half-brother Harry, who was selling at a drugstore, and promised to pay him back soon. As it turns out, he has already found work to do from a newspaper advertisement for a $20-a-day honorarium for making deliveries for a confectioner with his automobile. Sure enough, two weeks later, not only had he paid his brother back in full and acquired the automobile, but he also had coins jingling in his pocket.
Three years later, in 1917, after completing a two-year pre-medical program, Hamer hesitantly arrived at the prestigious Columbia Medical School and submitted his application for admission. The staff member in charge of registration looked him up and down and said, "You are the son of Dr. Julius, aren't you? I processed your father's application for admission in 1898, the year you were born, and I am here to welcome you again today." And so it was that Hamer proudly became a student at Columbia Medical School, and the boat of destiny carried him seemingly right on course to follow in his father's footsteps.
One day, however, his father came to Hamer on campus to tell his son the bad news: the pharmaceutical company in which he had invested his savings was on the verge of bankruptcy. And because of his own poor health, especially his desire to continue practicing medicine, he did not have the energy to take care of the management of the company; therefore, he asked his son to become the general manager of the company, but did not allow him to drop out of school. He emphasized, "Son, this is how I used to be in the past, you can be like this too."
In fact, his father's concern was completely unnecessary. Hammer had long jumped at the chance. He was extremely excited to meet such a challenge. In order not to miss school, Hamer invited a poor but excellent students to live together, free of charge to provide each other with food and lodging, on the condition that the students go to class every day, make a large number of notes, and bring them back to him at night for him to cope with the examination and write a paper. With this study "substitute", Hammer can concentrate on the company's business. He reformed the company's business policy and sales methods, organized a strong team of salesmen, and changed the company's name to the loud "United Chemical and Pharmaceutical Company". Hammer finally saved the company from the brink of bankruptcy, from a dozen employees to 1,500, the product is sold nationwide, the company began to cross the ranks of large enterprises in the pharmaceutical industry.
Shortly afterward, Hamer became a millionaire studying at Columbia Medical School, the only one of its kind in the nation's colleges and universities.
The average income in the United States in 1919 was $625, and Hamer's personal net income that year was more than $100 million. Academically, he received "A's" on most of his exams and was named "the most promising student" in his graduating class, and in June 1921 he received the M.D. degree that he had dreamed of as a child. He has been known as Dr. ever since, even though he never formally practiced medicine.
That's when Hamer decided to take advantage of the short six-month interval between the end of his coursework and the beginning of his internship to do the shocking thing of visiting the Soviet Union. After the October Revolution, Hamer's father, as one of the founders of the U.S.S.R., had taken a keen interest in the USSR and had supplied necessities to the blockaded Bolshevik regime. But due to a medical emergency, in June 1920, Hammer's father was tried and imprisoned. This sudden turn of events made the youthful Hamer determined to fulfill his father's attempted wish to travel to the country of his father's birth to help the Soviet Union overcome the famine and typhoid fever that was spreading there.
So Hammer sold the pharmaceutical company for $2 million, and spent more than 100,000 dollars to buy a field hospital and its supporting medical supplies and medical equipment, but also spent 15,000 dollars to buy an ambulance, painted on the side of the body, "U.S. Medical Corps to Moscow," the words. He wanted to give them to the Soviets as a welcome gift. At the time, the Soviet Union was isolated from most of the West, so to many, Hammer's trip was tantamount to an expedition to the moon. And so, at the age of 23, Hammer was on a path that would radically change his life.
The young millionaire made the arduous journey, finally arriving in the Soviet Union in the early summer of 1921. He fell ill from the strain of the journey. But he had no complaints, declined special favors, and lived a miserable wartime life with the Soviet people. He insisted on memorizing and learning to use 100 Russian words every day so that he could start working soon.
In early August 1921, Hamer accompanied a delegation to the Urals. He was puzzled by the situation here: on the one hand, there was a huge treasure and an abundance of goods, including platinum, precious stones, furs and other valuables; on the other hand, there was a severe famine, starvation and an acute shortage of the minimum necessities of life. So he asked the Soviets leading the group, "Why don't you export these things for mouthfuls of food?" "That's impossible," they replied, "Europe has just lifted its blockade against us, and it would take too long to sell these things and import grain. And it would take at least a million bushels of grain to save the people of the Urals from starvation." At this point a bold plan took shape in Hamer's mind. Remembering that the United States was having a bumper crop of grain at the time, and that the price of grain had fallen to $1 per bushel, he made the suggestion, "I have $1,000,000 in funds, and I can make an emergency purchase of 1,000,000 bushels of wheat in the United States, ship it by sea to Petrograd, and, after unloading the grain, return to the United States 1,000,000 dollars' worth of furs and other cargoes." Hammer's suggestion quickly reached Moscow, where Lenin personally returned a telegram endorsing the deal and asking Hammer to return to Moscow quickly.
The day after his arrival in Moscow, Hamer was summoned to Lenin's office. Lenin, who was pursuing a new economic policy to give the young Soviets a respite, took Hamer's offer seriously. Lenin stood up from his desk to welcome Hamer and spoke to him cordially in English. When Lenin, on behalf of the Soviet government, expressed his sincere gratitude to Hamer, the great revolutionary shed tears of emotion. From then on, a sincere and deep friendship was formed between them. Lenin encouraged Hamer to invest in a factory and allowed him to mine asbestos in Siberia, thus making him the first foreigner in the Bolshevik Soviet Union to obtain mining rights.
This began the barter trade between the United States and the Soviet Union. Hammer organized the United States, communicating with more than 30 American companies, he became the Soviet Union's agent for trade with the United States. Later, as a result of a chance discovery, Hamer set up a pencil factory in the Soviet Union. One day, he stopped into a stationery store to buy pencils, but the store only had expensive German goods. He was struck by the realization that making pencils was a new and profitable business. He didn't know how to make pencils himself, but he knew how to use people who did. He hired technicians from Germany and Britain with high salaries to set up a pencil factory, with the U.S. piece-rate wage system to manage production, the results in just seven or eight months, miraculously put into production, the first year reached 2.5 million U.S. dollars in production value. A few years later, Hammer not only met the needs of the Soviet pencil and pen market, but also exported 20% of its products to more than a dozen countries, including Britain. The plant soon became one of the largest pencil factories in the world, bringing Hamer millions of dollars in revenue as well.
Hammer spent nearly a decade in Moscow, and the Soviet Union became the billionaire's birthplace, while he supported the young Soviet regime with his efforts.
The most active period of Hammer's life, however, began when he returned to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1931. He cast his net in all directions and struck gold, achieving success in whatever profession he pursued. He was like an all-purpose magician who could conjure rabbit after rabbit out of a bowler hat in front of a large audience. His dazzling range of businesses included, in addition to buying and selling art, radio broadcasting, gold trading and philanthropy; but it was in the whisky and cattle-breeding business that his talents were best demonstrated.
Hammer returned to the U.S. in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, but he saw an opportunity to make money. Though his eyes were fixed on the business of art sales, his ears were listening in all directions. He caught a clear message that Roosevelt was on his way to the White House presidency, and if he was ever elected to implement his New Deal, Prohibition, enacted in 1919, would be repealed. This would mean a surge in the national demand for beer and whiskey, and the number of kegs would show an unprecedented demand at a time when there were no kegs for sale on the market. Harmer made a snap decision and immediately ordered several shipments of quality lumber from the Soviet Union, set up a temporary barrel stave processing plant at the New York docks, and built a modern cask factory in New Jersey. The day Prohibition was repealed was also the day when the barrels rolled off the production line at Hammer Barrel Company, and his barrels were snapped up by various distilleries at high prices. Not content with being a barrel supplier, Hammer got involved in the liquor business and started a whiskey business. He purchased a number of distilleries in succession, and by means of drastic price cuts and large-scale advertising, he soon outperformed all his competitors. His Dent brand whiskey jumped to become the nation's first-class famous liquor, annual sales of up to 1 million cases.
The barrels introduced Hamer to the whiskey business, and his love of steak introduced him to another field, cattle ranching, with equal success.
Hammer's foray into cattle ranching was also purely accidental. When he complained that he couldn't get a good steak at the market, one of his employees suggested buying a cow and killing it. The cow came back, but it was a cow that was pregnant with a calf. Thinking he wasn't greedy enough to kill a pregnant cow, Hammer kept the cow on the property. It just so happened that Hammer's neighbor was a cattle expert, specializing in breeding Angus cattle, he not only bought back the cow for Hammer successfully delivered, and soon after let the cow and his bull mating, gave birth to a calf with the excellent quality of the Angus breed of cattle. Hammer was impressed by the cattleman and became interested in raising cattle. Because his mind flashed a new business brainwave: the by-products of brewing to raise breeding cattle, not to lose the residue into gold.
Hammer quickly set up a large ranch for breeding stock and spent $100,000 on one of the best bulls of the century, Prince Eric. Over the next three years, Prince Eric alone bred 1,000 calves, including six world champions, earning him $2 million. Hamer also went from cattle ranching amateur to a recognized leader in the breeding industry.
In 1956, Hamer was 58 years old. He had amassed more wealth in business than he could count. He did intend to retire from the business world and move his family to California with his third new wife, ready to live out his old age in peace and quiet. However, a chance, full of temptation of the oil industry to conquer him, he began to live a new life of "life began in 60", and became a world-famous oil giant.
At the time, there was a nearly bankrupt Occidental Petroleum Company in California, with real assets of only $34,000, three employees and a few oil wells that were about to be scrapped, and the company's stock was selling for only 18 cents a share. A distant relative of Hammer's, an accountant known far and wide in Los Angeles, suggested to Hammer that he invest in this oil company. Because, according to the U.S. government's favorable policy toward the oil industry, money spent on oil wells that had not yet produced oil was not subject to tax reporting. For the idle Hammer, he had no intention of buying the company, but was willing to lend Occidental $50,000 to drill two more wells. If the wells produced oil, each party would get 50 percent of the profits, and if they didn't, Hammer's money would be deducted from his tax bill as a loss. Surprisingly, both wells produced oil. Occidental Petroleum's stock immediately rose to 1 dollar per share, Hammer also tasted the sweetness, began to get involved in the oil industry. Soon, Hammer became the largest shareholder of this company, and in July 1957 was elected chairman and general manager of Occidental Petroleum.
Hammer, with his many years of experience and at great risk, began to build an oil empire. He recruited the best drilling engineers and the best geologists, and in 1961 finally drilled two huge natural gas fields in California. Occidental's stock price jumped to $15 a share, and the company was strong enough to compete with the world's larger oil companies.
By that time, most of the world's rich oil fields were already owned by the seven Western oil companies known as the "Seven Sisters," and it was difficult for Hammer to get its hands on them. Therefore, the adventurous spirit of Hammer, against the pressure of the company inside and outside, bet on Libya. In other oil companies give up no hope of oil on the two leases, Hammer perseverance, at the end of 1966, finally found a large oil vein, opened up two new oil fields producing high-grade crude oil. Occidental Petroleum Corporation in Hammer's operation, business is booming, profits rise year by year, the scope of oil exploration continues to expand, from domestic to foreign, from land to sea, successively in the Middle East, the North Sea, South America, as well as Pakistan, the South China Sea and other places to find a rich source of oil. Especially in the North Sea area achieved the most obvious results: his company into the latest, but the earliest out of oil. 1974, his West Oil Company annual income of 6 billion U.S. dollars. By 1982, Occidental had become the nation's 12th-largest industrial company and, next to the Seven Sisters, the world's eighth-largest oil company.
In order to better adapt to the needs of the changing business world, one of Hammer's tricks of the trade was to never hang on to a single tree and to run a multi-faceted business. It's been the key to his longevity.
Shortly after Occidental discovered oil in Libya at the end of 1966, Hammer bought Permian & McWoods and Garrett Research & Development with 88 million yuan in stock.
In January 1968, when Occidental's stock rose to more than $100 a share, Hammer promptly converted each old share into three new ones, and the price of each new share later rose to $55. Hamer took advantage of this favorable opportunity to use the company's stock as currency to develop a variety of businesses such as coal and chemical products.
In early 1968, Occidental Petroleum bought Island Creek Coal Company, the third-ranked coal company in the United States, for $150 million. The company had annual sales of $150 million and 3.5 billion tons of coal reserves, and in 1974, Island Creek had a net profit of nearly $100 million.
In July 1968, Occidental Petroleum bought Hooker Chemical and Plastic Products for $800 million in preferred stock, the largest merger ever in the United States.
By the 1970s, Hammer's sights had turned even wider.
In 1972, after many political twists and turns, Hammer made a 20-year, $20 billion fertilizer deal with the Soviet Union, pushing U.S.-Soviet trade to its peak.
In May 1979, at the invitation of Comrade Deng Xiaoping, Hammer, 81, became the first Western entrepreneur to visit China on a private jet. Since then, Western oil companies have signed a series of economic cooperation agreements with our government. Among them, the Shanxi Pingshuo Antaibao open-pit coal mine, with an annual production capacity of 15.33 million tons of raw coal, was Dr. Hamer's largest project with China and the largest Sino-foreign joint venture in China at that time.
In 1981, Occidental Petroleum merged with two major U.S. meat processors, which made Occidental Petroleum also the largest producer of meat products in the United States.
In this way, Occidental's business composition has evolved from a single oil company to a multifaceted conglomerate that includes coal, chemicals, fertilizers, and metal processing. To date, it has branches in more than 50 countries around the world and sales of nearly $20 billion, thus ranking it among the ranks of the famous American big business.
Hammer, as a successful entrepreneur, is unusual in that his business is often linked to politics, and he regards money as a floating cloud and seems to be more concerned about peace for mankind. In his office, there are a lot of precious photos, the center one is a picture with Lenin's handwriting inscription, in addition to several U.S. presidents, foreign heads of state and his group photo. He was the initiator and patron of the annual "International Conference on Peace and Human Rights". He was a well-known social activist who often flew from country to country on his own airplane to deliver messages of peace, and who called for and promoted meetings between the top leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. He was a frequent and generous supporter of cultural, educational and social welfare programs. He founded the Cancer Research Center and chaired the U.S. President's three-member Cancer Research Advisory Panel. He personally led a medical team to the Soviet Union to rescue victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. He was a philanthropist and donor, and in 1988 he donated 20,000 dollars to the China Children's and Youth Foundation.
This healthy old man in his nineties is extremely vigorous, looking like a 60-year-old and working like a middle-aged man in his prime. As always, he is running around, living a kaleidoscopic and busy life, constantly having new pursuits, constantly scaling new heights, and being hailed by the world as the most incredible tycoon of the 20th century.