Shell Fires Another 10,000
As reflective of trends in the industry Shell Fires 10,000 Workers
As its fortunes collapse due to falling oil prices, Royal
Dutch Shell PLC will fire 10,000 people in an effort to bolster margins.
Operating costs have reduced by $4 billion, or around 10% in 2015, and the
company expects Shell’s costs to fall again in 2016 by a further $3 billion.
Synergies from the BG combination will be in addition to that.
Together, these actions will include a reduction of some 10,000 staff and
direct contractor positions in 2015-16 across both companies, as streamlining
and integration of the two companies continue.
Did Shell Overpay for BG?
The "BG combination" mention above but not explained (emphasis
mine) refers to the Shell Takeover of BG announced in December.
Royal Dutch Shell is pressing ahead with its $60bn (£40bn)
takeover of BG Group despite doubts among some shareholders about the deal’s
viability given the falling oil price.
Some Shell shareholders believe the company is paying over the odds for BG
because the deal was agreed in April on the assumption that oil prices would
recover to $90 a barrel by 2020. The price of oil has slumped from $115 a
barrel in summer 2014 to less than $40. On Monday it dropped to an 11-year
low of $36.17.
David Cumming, head of equities at Standard Life Investments, said last week
the deal does not make sense with the oil price so low. He called on Shell’s
boss, Ben van Beurden, to pay a $750m break fee to scrap the deal or
renegotiate the terms. The only other option is for shareholders to vote
against the takeover, he said.
Merger Rule Number One
Management is never fired for questionable, even outright bad, corporate
decisions. Employees, not management takes the hit. In this case, chalk up
another 10,000 employee synergies.
Energy Layoffs Pile Up
In Search of Jobs
On November 23, Houston Public Media reported Oil Workers Brace For Fresh Layoffs, As Industry Wrestles
With ‘Lower For Longer’ Crude Prices
“We’re seeing declines in population across these towns in
south Texas,” says Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston.
For nearly eight years, high-paying jobs grew at a blistering pace across the
region, long one of the poorest in the state. Now companies are shutting down
operations, and those jobs are vanishing. “And until the price returns to a
level above $75, $85, $95 a barrel,” Hirs says, “we won’t see a complete
reemployment of everybody who’s left.”
So people are leaving — not just south Texas, but the industry — in search of
work. Some will come back when the price of oil recovers. But this is an
industry where roughly 70 percent of the workforce is over age 50. That’s the
legacy of weak hiring during the oil bust of the 1980s and 1990s.
“I think this is going to be an acute problem in a couple of years’ time. I
think it’s going to come bite us extremely hard,” says Tobias Read, CEO of
Swift Worldwide Resources, an energy recruiting firm based in Houston.
Two years ago, the energy sector’s big concern was a shortage of skilled
workers. Companies were scrambling to train up a new generation of engineers
and geologists, pipefitters and project managers, to replace those they were
about to lose.
“They’ve spent a lot of time retaining, recruiting, and training talent,”
says Chad Hesters, who runs the Houston office of recruiting firm Korn Ferry.
“They don’t want to see that talent leave. It’s incredibly expensive to have
people you’ve spent years training walk out the door.”
Global Oil Layoffs Top 250,000
On November 20, Bloomberg noted Oil Jobs Cuts Top 250,000.
The number of jobs gutted from oil and gas companies
around the world has now passed the 250,000 mark, with still more to come,
according to industry consultant Graves & Co.
"I was surprised it’s gotten this far," John Graves, whose Houston
firm assists in oil and gas deals with audits and due diligence, said Friday
in a phone interview.
The industry has idled more than 1,000 rigs and slashed more than $100
billion in spending this year to cope with oil prices that have fallen by
more than half since 2014. Oil services, drilling and supply companies
are bearing the brunt of the downturn, having accounted for 79 percent of the
layoffs, according to Graves.
The winner of the blue ribbon award for accurate
prediction in the month of November goes to Graves for his understatement
"It’s going to get worse before it gets better."
56,000 Layoffs in Texas Alone
On November 12, FuelFix reported Oil crash job losses in Texas may be steeper than previously
thought.
The number of oil and gas job losses in Texas may be far
worse than an industry group originally predicted, potentially reaching
56,000, according to the latest analysis by the Texas Alliance of Energy
Producers.
When crude prices started collapsing late last year, Karr Ingham, a petroleum
economist for the alliance, initially forecast that the state could lose
40,000 to 50,000 upstream oil and gas jobs during the downturn, but the fresh
plunge in oil prices over the summer forced additional round of layoffs
across Texas.
“We now appear to be well beyond that estimate and the end is not in sight,”
Ingham said in a statement Thursday.
That 56,000 estimate was from early November. What is it
now?
Unambiguously Good
The price of US and Brent crud both broke $28 to the downside today but
remain hovering near that level.
Don't fret. I have it on good authority this decline in oil prices is "Unambiguously
Good" for the economy.
In a CNBC video in November of 2014, Kudlow stated Drop in Oil Prices is Unambiguously Good.
It was not just Kudlow making such statements. Various Fed officials believed
the same thing.
"We Got This Wrong"
Let's now flash forward to a bit of reality.On January 9, 2016, San Francisco
Fed president John Williams finally admitted "We Got
This Wrong".
Williams still does not realize precisely what is wrong.
Oil prices in and of themselves are inherently neither good nor bad. It all
depends on why. In this case, the Fed sent false economic signals with round
after round of QE, and by once again keeping interest rates too low, too
long.
Effects were not seen in consumer prices as the Fed wanted. Rather, asset
price bubbles developed in stocks, bonds, and junk bond borrowings of
hundreds of billions of dollars to drill wells smack into a slumping global economy.
The only "tools" the Fed knows are rates cuts and QE. But that's
what created this mess. And here we sit with the Fed still insisting four
more hikes are coming in 2016.
The market now spits in the Fed's face.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
