Finanzas

Finanzas
Profesora Myrna Berrios
Asignacion grupal

1.
Global Oil Companies Discover Cash in Their Trash

Companies like BP and Shell fetch top prices for assets many thought they'd struggleto discard to pay tens of billions of dollars in costs from the Deepwater Horizon disaster and spill, BP has been forced to ditch oil fields and other energy properties across the globe. Now othercompanies including Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil , which sold nine of its Gulf of Mexico fields for about $1 billion last year, are also making divestitures of their less-attractive assets. Assetsales by the world's oil majors exceeded $50 billion last year, the most in at least 12 years. The sales are being prompted by several factors, including an abundance of buyers, stable oil prices thatmake deals easier, and a continuing shortage of the skilled staff needed to develop and operate oil fields. The most important factor may be a kind of identity crisis the big companies are strugglingthrough. The markets used to reward the majors with higher share prices than their smaller competitors. No longer. Investors today see these companies as unwieldy conglomerates with little potential forgrowth. Over the last five years, stocks of the six largest Western oil companies: ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total , Chevron , and Conoco Phillips, have logged an average annual return of just 5percent. That's considerably less than the 8.3 percent returned by an index of smaller oil companies, including Anadarko Petroleum and Apache , and downright puny compared with the rocket-propelledperformance of some smaller exploration companies such as Africa specialist Tullow Oil, which averaged 38 percent. They're putting low-growth or marginal businesses on the block to raise money to plow intoexploration, liquefied natural gas, and deepwater drilling activities that bring higher risks along with the possibility of better returns. There's been no shortage of buyers. Occidental and Apache,...