Exxon Mobil to sell 1,740 East Coast service stations to Tosco

DALLAS — The new Exxon Mobil Corp. wasted no time Thursday in selling a big chunk of the service stations that regulators forced it to unload.

The newly merged company announced Thursday it has agreed to sell 1,740 stations in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states to Tosco Corp. for $860 million.

Just two days earlier, Exxon Corp. and Mobil Corp. had agreed to a demand by the Federal Trade Commission to sell 2,431 stations over the next year as part of the merger.

Tusco’s bid beat out an offer by New Brunswick-based Irving Oil Ltd., which has plans to expand in the United States, according to an article published in Friday’s edition of the Times Globe of Saint John, New Brunswick. Irving currently has about 180 stations in New England and about 800 in Canada, from Quebec to Newfoundland.

“We fought hard right until the end,” said Bryan Monkhouse, Irving’s head of marketing, who is based in Portsmouth, N.H. Irving Oil had been working on the deal for a number of months, Monkhouse told the Times GLobe, but the company would not confirm it was interested in the staions until Thursday.

Monkhouse also told the Canadian paper that Irving would continue its efforts to expand in the American market.

Separately, Texas-based Exxon Mobil said it might exceed the 9,000 layoffs estimated by the companies when they announced their plan to merge last December. The company also said that cost savings from the merger will probably exceed the officially estimated $2.8 billion.

Ed Maran, an analyst with A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc., said he was disappointed with the likelihood of still-deeper layoffs from the new company’s work force of 123,000.

“At some point, they’ve got to shift from cost-cutting to making sure they’re ready to grow when dust settles from the merger,” Maran said.

The service stations to be bought by Stamford, Conn.-based Tosco include Mobil stations from Virginia to New Jersey and the Exxon system from New York to Maine, the companies said.