- Statoil, Norway's government-owned oil company, has changed its name to Equinor.
- It announced the news with a bizarre video that features gymnasts, an acne-covered teen, and a woman giving birth.
- Statoil/Equinor says that the name change is not just cosmetic, however, and signals a move towards being a "broad energy company," rather than simply focusing on oil.
Statoil, Norway's government-owned oil company, has changed its name - and it made the announcement in a bizarre fashion.
The firm, the world's 11th largest oil and gas company, released a video on Thursday announcing that after 45 years of operations, it is changing its name to Equinor.
The video is perhaps not what you'd expect from a company with assets worth more than €100 billion.
Starting off with the scream of a woman echoing through a forest, the video then cuts to her giving birth, before shots of a little girl doing gymnastics, a classroom of children learning that "to learn is to change", and a spotty teenager looking in the mirror cross the screen.
After a minute or so, the video's narrator confirms that even big companies like Statoil change, eventually announcing the change of name right at the end of the two-minute long clip.
Here's the video in all its glory:
Explaining the meaning of the new name, the company said that "Equinor is formed by combining 'equi', the starting point for words like equal, equality and equilibrium, and 'nor', signalling a company proud of its Norwegian origin, and who wants to use this actively in its positioning."
"Equinor is a powerful expression of who we are, where we come from and what we aspire to be. We are a values-based company, and equality describes how we want to approach people and the societies where we operate," Eldar Sætre, chief executive of Statoil, or is it Equinor, said in a statement.
"The Norwegian continental shelf will remain the backbone of our company, and we will use our Norwegian heritage in our positioning as we continue growing internationally within both oil, gas and renewable energy."
Equinor says that the name change is not just cosmetic, however, and signals a move towards being a "broad energy company," rather than simply focusing on oil.
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