History
ATCO was founded in 1947, with matching cash investments by Ron Southern and his father S.D. Southern, under the name Alberta Trailer Hire, renting utility trailers in the Calgary area. As the company's operations grew, they also began to sell trailers, first becoming the Alberta Trailer Company, then ATCO. By the early 1960s, the company had operations across North America and in Australia.
ATCO Industries Ltd. became a public company in March 1968, with shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. During the 1970s, the company expanded into the natural gas and petroleum industries, and into the electricity industry in the 1980s.
In 2004, with the deregulation of the retail energy industry in Alberta, ATCO sold the retail operations of ATCO Gas and ATCO Electric to Direct Energy Marketing Ltd.; ATCO Gas and ATCO Electric still operate as "distributors" (owning and operating the infrastructure that delivers natural gas or electricity in its service territories) but are no longer in the retail market. As part of the sale to DEML, DEML contracted call center and billing services from ATCO I-Tek. This split between "retailer" and "distributor" has proved to be confusing to many Alberta consumers, many of whom have interpreted the change as meaning that Direct Energy now owns ATCO.
Read more about this topic: ATCO
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)