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Moy - I do think part of this negative press is bp's own fault - why have they waited 12m+ post a new CEO to set-out the new CEO strategy. no wonder equity analysts and shareholders are wondering what the hell is going on with obvious impact to the SP drifting lower. No one has any clue what we stand for anymore.

Here's a contreversial opinion - I'd rather our CEO be a boring returns focused CEO than one trying to "rewire the planet" - I dont invest in bp for them to be anything else than to generate consistent (boring) returns. The most boring and consistent of returns is focusing on O&G - and everyone knows this, so lets hope it comes through in Feb.

I'll leave the googles and amazons of my portfolio to change the world - here I just want a growing dividend, growing FCF with not much share price volatility outside of macro events you cannot forsee

O&G majors are so well covered that known events like this are largely priced in months in advance. I expect nothing to happen here on Monday relating to Trumps inaugration

US supply is largely tapped out to offset OPEC cuts, US oilers wont want to invest in hiking production for lower returns than they are currently getting. Trump's drill baby drill is a pander to his base and wont actually come through politically or commercially.

at 70-80 brent oil is seems to be in a sweet spot between growing demand and capped supply positions - 2025 will be another record oil demand year, the discussion you want to have is just by how much... dont trust the IEA is my advice as they are consistently wrong. Catalysts here are whatever comes out of the strategy day, removing buybacks to reduce debt or lift divi and evidence of the $2bn cash savings.

From skynews:

Mr Auchincloss said around 2,600 of the contractors involved in the job cuts had already left the business.

Sigh another round of job cuts, sad to see colleagues leave and come under threat. I do question how bp need to cut 7k positions after such a large re-org in 2021. Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

On my holidays currently, 27c where I am and I hear it’s much different back in the UK

Good to see us lift back over £4 and into a more sensible price range. Let’s hope we can hold it into the next strategy update

Anyway back to the bar

Hahaha this gave me a laugh!

Tedmak “just a collection of businesses” is exactly where shell / bp / total derive their value and is the core differentiator in strategy vs US oilers. All about an integrated value chain where at each point you have an opportunity to maximise the value of the molecule or kWh you sell.

Chevron and Exxon would kill to have the integrated trading capability present in shell and bp. They have tried and failed many times to establish this.

Stay away from HE1, I made a killing off them during the COVID wave but they have consistently screwed PI's over for the benefit of the directors, ridiulously low priced placings for directors that have diluted PIs into oblivion. Please take my advice. Its a classic AIM get rich quick scheme masquerading as a real company. They've delivered nothing in five years.

I was thinking how ironic it would be, if in Looney’s new position on the board of XRG, ADNOC made another attempt to wangle a stake of BP. With the ego’s involved it wouldn’t surprise me.

I'm partial to banana's and honey on toast - not sure it rolls of the tongue as well as a saying though.

Have a good xmas all - enjoyed the commentary this year, always interested to hear others point of view.

For 2025, its about time for bp's valuation to normalise, hopefully having a CFO as CEO drives more financial prudence into the business which lifts the shareprice and maybe, just maybe the equity analysts get their head around the debt position, anything is possible.

Brent price was $81 a year ago based on my tradingview chart. We sit at $73 as we speak which explains some of the price difference. However share count is down in that time, the business now has a permanent CEO and stated short term goals of cost reduction.

The "high debt" levels is only in comparison to peers, historically speakings its ok which is why I sense the board favours buybacks over deleveraging currently. this will come good - it just needs a strategic kick up the jacksy for the market to wake up.

Agree Jakers, meoryou, My comment was meant that I dont believe what they say when they are bullish which makes me question anything else they put forward, be it bullish or bearish - one thing is for sure. It sounds like they've lost a lot of confidence in the investment case.

Lost any confidence in the Barclays analyst when the made and then held a £10 price target

Sadly I agree with wookieemonster - I think bp didnt jusr write down rosneft to zero for accounting rules. It became a toxic asset as soon as the first russian foot stepped over the border. Face value of nil. If we get anything at all back from a potential sale it will be a miracle. I cant see bp arbitrating against the russian state. Those billions in equity and billions in dividends are at the mercy of the russian government. And I don't trust them to do anything but serve their self-interests.

Aye I wish I could buy shares 5% under market value too - numpties.

Entirely on pumping oil and gas, rather than refining it and selling it to costumers.

There’s another US option: tapping Warren Buffett’s riches via a deal with Occidental Petroleum Corp. Adding Occidental’s shale operations to BP’s best assets could work; though, here again, the British government might object to BP relocating to America.

Finally, BP could seek a Middle Eastern strategic investor – the state-owned oil companies of Abu Dhabi and Kuwait come to mind. In the late 1980s the Kuwaitis bought more than a fifth of BP, although later London intervened and forced the Middle Eastern nation to sell a chunk. With that history, a deal may be complicated — but state-controlled firms are keen to expand into trading and LNG. Moreover, if new shareholders force a change of strategic direction, they’ll benefit from any resulting rally in BP shares.

Considering BP’s disastrous performance in recent years, the board should be considering all options. To my mind, putting itself up for sale would be a sensible move — and the sooner the better.

On the FTSE 100 blue chip index in the past 12 months. It doesn’t look prettier if one looks further afield — in the past five years, its shares are down 20%, compared with gains for its rivals of 10% to 70%. BP’s stock would be even lower if investors weren’t anticipating either an activist emerging or an M&A deal. But those opportunistic hedge fund bets won’t last for ever.

To be sure, the company is far from a basket case. Its Gulf of Mexico business is second to none and its trading capabilities are legendary. But it’s also carrying a lot of underperforming divisions, while its Russian business is so toxic that it’s impossible to value.

Importantly, BP is probably worth more as the sum of its parts than as a whole, offering an opportunity for any buyer to hang on to the assets it wants, and sell the rest: Private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds would be eager buyers of whatever a potential purchaser was willing to dispose of.

If the BP chairman did make the call, Shell CEO Wael Sawan should pick up the phone. The numbers would stack up even after paying a typical 30% premium. Synergies alone would generate billions of dollars of savings; when analysts at Barclays Plc did the sums on a fantasy BP-Shell merger, they came up with $7.5 billion in annual operating cost savings and a $5 billion reduction in capital expenditure, suggesting the transaction would pay for itself in a few short years.

Moreover, buying BP would resolve key problems for Shell; how to sustain growth after 2030, and how to add exposure to the US. Shell executives have made some very good decisions in recent years; abandoning the American shale sector wasn’t one of them. The main obstacle to a deal? Shell is currently focusing on a business revamp that won’t be completed until mid-2026, so a transaction with BP now would be earlier than the company would wish. The thing about M&A, though is that it happens when it’s possible, not when the time is ideal.

There are other options. BP could try to entice TotalEnergies SE into a merger of equals of sorts, but the idea of a French-British — with emphasis on that particular order of nationalities — oil company seems farfetched. The UK government might not be so keen on a foreign takeover. I also worry that buying BP would burden Total’s balance sheet too much, particularly if oil and gas prices remain at current levels.

In the absence of a European deal, BP might be attractive to US oil giant-in-waiting ConocoPhillips. Conoco has a market value of $135 billion, making it almost double the size of BP. It’s expanding in liquefied natural gas, and BP could turbocharge that business; it would also deliver a fantastic trading business to Conoco, along with production in the Gulf of Mexico, where the US-based company isn’t currently present. But Conoco would have to dispose of way too many other assets, starting with the downstream operations; the company has spent more than a decade focusing

BP Chairman Needs to Put the Company Up for Sale - Bloomberg

Javier Blas

December 9, 2024 at 5:00 AM UTC

BP’s future as a standalone entity is bleak. The board should put the UK oil company up for sale.

Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

In the spring of 1998, with oil hovering near $10 a barrel, BP Plc reached a dismal conclusion: Its future as a standalone company was grim. So John Browne, its chief executive officer at the time, rang the chairman of US rival Amoco and proposed a merger. The deal, announced in August of that year, triggered a flurry of M&A activity that created the current Big Oil mob.

Today, BP is at a similar juncture. Its future alone is bleak. Investors have lost faith in its strategy, its management and its board. Even sell-side analysts, typically deferential to the companies they cover, are out for blood: Take the headline of a recent report by veteran analyst Paul Sankey that read “BP Results: Beat? Miss? Who Cares, Fire the Board.”

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. BP Chairman Helge Lund needs to pick up the phone and seek a deal — effectively putting the company up for sale. If he plays it well, the oil major may get to call the resulting transaction a “merger of equals.” So who can he phone? Shell Plc, of course. Moreover, the UK government should encourage such a deal with the aim of keeping a Shell-BP company British and still listed in London.

BP executives may be pinning their hopes that a strategic update, scheduled for February, will revive the company’s fortunes. Lund was in the US last month sounding out institutional investors; my understanding is that they denounced the current strategy. In 2020, BP made a bet: oil demand had peaked, and the future was about reducing fossil fuel output and investing an ever-larger share of its budget in green electricity, primarily wind and solar power. Since then, the company has rowed back on its green strategy, but investors are demanding it refocus on its traditional strengths — oil and gas.

While some are willing to give the board the benefit of the doubt for the next few months, I doubt BP can change direction to their satisfaction. My skepticism is compounded by the board’s selection of Murray Auchincloss, one of the architects of the current strategy, as its chief executive. If the board wanted a U-turn, it should have chosen a different leader in January.

BP Is Trailing Big Oil

The British group is the worst performer among the top-5 oil majors

-60

-40

-20

0

20

40

60

80 %

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

Source: Bloomberg

Data is normalized with percentage appreciation as of December 9, 2019.

The damage to BP in recent years has been enormous. At about $75 billion, BP’s market valuation is a shadow of its previous might. In 2006, the company was worth $250 billion; even in 1998, before the merger with Amoco, it was worth $80 billion. Its stock-market performance has been horrid. BP is among the top-10 w

Nala, We're due to hit record oil demand this year, and it'll go even higher next year.

Renewables are not even replacing energy demand growth, which is why O&G is increasing despite EV volumes growing. As long as the world keeps adding energy demand, which i foresee for the next ten years, china, india anyone? then O&G stocks will continual to be cyclical, not managed decline.