Member Info for Harmonica

If there were a contested bid, is there a single price, that if offered, would tempt you to sell your entire holding in BP? Or would you wait until the Board of Directors accepted an offer and therefore not have to pay any fees to have your shares acquired by the winning bidder?

For me, unless a bid was 500p or higher, I should nit be tempted to sell my holding.

You?

Ginger,

The closing share price of BP on Friday reflects all known information concerning the company, which includes its debts.

The share price closed at over 370p.

So, given that, a bid of 300p now would be unlikely to be acceptable to any shareholders since they can obtain over 70p more simply by selling to the market!

Put another way, would you sell any of your holding in BP for 300p? No, I did not think so.

A first bid would very likely be at least 100p more than the current price. A low ball offer would only tempt other bidders to enter the auction.

If not cancelled, presumably any budder would have to buy these too. No impact on corporate debts of BP.

Debt has its advantages.

It raises capital without the need for new issues of shares, diluting our holdings. It can be cheaper as debtnjbtetest I'd fully deductible against Corporation Taxes.

Mark,

The consideration, that is what is paid, could all cash only, all shares only ir a mixture. Whether it is profitable for rhe existing shareholders depends on whether the business is sound and profitable anyway.

I could do with a contested takeover to drive the share price up loads...less to make a profit, but more to reduce the loss I have on my BP shares!

A contested takeover would surely add 150p+!

Elsewhere I see the BP share Price up over 7p currently. Here it is negative!

Something wrong somewhere!

Q.Armani

Why are you so against debt? Debt interest was ridiculously cheap for many years, so the Board would have been sensible to get loads on board rather than diluting the holdings of shareholders. It was a relatively cheap way to obtain capital to leverage the company.

Sure, if some of it has become overly expensive, then pay it down if possible.

Otherwise be grateful that the Board did not declare a rights issue to create capital.

What is wrong with an electric aeroplane, if such a thing exists? Yes, their batteries will eventually run flat, but jet fuel eventually runs dry!

For electric locomotives, a power cut is very serious immediately. However, for cars,nit depends. Hybrid cars could carry on. For EV cars, they do have batteries to keep going for a time.

Sorry, but what evidence do you have to show us that the EPS is not sufficient to cover dividends? Regardless, if there are sufficient revenue reserves and cash/cashflow to pay dividends, then these can continue.

As for paying down debt...why should the company deleverage? As a shareholder, I am delighted that capital has been raised to fund the business forwards and it has not come at the expense of issuing new shares to dilute my shareholding! Until recently, debt was very plentiful and ridiculously cheap! Remember base rates barely above zero? Sure pay off any expensive debts, not allowed, otherwise keep the cash for investment and to pay dividends.

Tinker T.,

As far as I can remember, buybacks continued. Had they stopped, the share price would have fallen sooner.

Buying at 540p might have been a brilliant idea had the price then risen, say to to 600p. There is ni way that the boD could know ahead of time; therefore they had to keep buying.

Invstrat,

If you are going to call people "naiave and/or mentally challenged", you had better learn how to spell 'naive' properly or else you risk people thinking that the person ŵho is 'mentally challenged" is the person making the accusation! Mind you, they do say that it takes one to know one!

For future reference, the way to remember how to spell 'naive', a word that I have had difficulty in spelling in the past is to remember the name of the French water brand, Evian', and writing that word backwards!

Meoryou,

Are you suggesting that they speculate to get the best prices? I think that the aim is simply to purchase the quarterly target spread over the quarter, so highs will cancel out with lows.

Are we not informed of the average price paid for those buybacks?

The Pound is down against the US Dollar as I type.

Armami,

You forget that the millions upon millions of shares bought and cancelled no longer get rewarded with dividend payments, so a cash saving for BP!

As for having debt, yes it means having to pay interest, but it is also a means of funding which does not dilute our shareholding and, better still, it provides gearing or leverage to grow the business.

That was the week that was.

3am and the Nikkei is down over 4%.

Does not promise well for the opening price of FTSE-100 shares!

£5.00 seems out if the question as the global economy would appear to be heading for a slowdown.