I must say it was a pleasure listening the Q&A section during todays earnings call. A big applause to the analyst from Bank of America, he delivered a master class in savagery. He simply destroyed our folks with the dividend question. I felt hopeless listening to the answer. At least Granda can live off the dividend for a bit longer.
12 replies (most recent on top)
@1mfm+17GmwZwG They don’t. Remember the article stating that Bryan Milton, John Verity and even Liam were selling away their stake above 60? They didn’t believe in it too! And why would they tell you the truth.. it’s their job to say the right things.. but their actions show us otherwise..
Darren Woods suggested that Chevorn is like Enron.. he planted that thought to us remember.. we should have known..
In Mortal Kombat voice:
- Finish him!!! (Doug then takes care of things)
- Doug Legatte wins, Flawless Victory, Fatality
I guess Darren Woods was too busy admiring the view out his window to talk about the company. When will the lapdog board terminate him? He can then join the same country club as the boys from Enron.
Doug Leggate is my hero. ❤️
It is ironic: I used to look at my little quarterly dividend check as a pleasant little surprise, a little extra money to spend on something fun. Now it looks like a down payment on a pink slip
They can’t explain the dividend policy because it doesn’t make sense. Just people with RSUs paying themselves...why aren’t they buying shares if they believe in the 10-11% yield? Guess they really don’t...
It would have been so much easier if they had ended that exchange with a simple but powerful #WeAreExxonMobil, that would have sent the analyst crying back to mommy.
EM sounded like a bunch of drunk titanic captains announcing no need to end the party at this time. Keep the booze flowing with the dancing girls and music.
Granda will sleep well after listening to that exchange
From the transcript at Seeking Alpha
We'll next go to Doug Leggate with Bank of America.
Doug Leggate
Andy and Jack, thanks for both of you guys getting on the call and letting it run a little long. I appreciate you getting me on. Andy, I'm going to sound a little bit on the dividend. I'd like to pre-phase my question like this, if the market is not prepared to pay for the recovery that you're laying out, which it clearly isn't, given where your stock is trading. Every time you pay a dividend that you can't afford, you're transferring value from equity to debt or basically your share price is going down. And that's basically what's happening right now.
So, if the market is not paying you for that dividend despite the 60 plus years that you've paid this dividend, why would you continue to do that? And I'm curious what the view of the Board and the credit agencies are on this issue. And I guess the bottom line is what conditions would it take for you to say, you know what, we're not getting paid for this dividend, let's just cut and run and use the cash to preserve equity value?
Andrew Swiger
Doug, this is something that we have thought long and hard about. We've discussed with our Board every quarter when we make the dividend discussion. But I'll tell you, we fully understand the importance of the dividend to our shareholders. It's very important to them and we're very thoughtful on that.
What we've done is said to ourselves, let's look and see, and balancing in capital allocation and balancing with how we see with the likelihood the world evolving. What the right plan is to be able to meet our shareholders needs, interest in the dividend, at the same time moving the business forward there.
So, we've constructed a plan that based on the things what we see happening in the market. The calibrations of what the business is doing, balance all of those sort of things and retain a little bit of flexibility as it goes forward. Now, as we talked about before, we do see ourselves moving back to bottom of the cycle conditions because the industry simply cannot continue on at these levels here, and in that plan, we will be able to maintain the dividend.
We get into some situation where we're back in a world like we've been in the second and third quarters, obviously, all bets are off. And I think that's true across the industry. But we also don't think that's sustainable. So, that's really the rationale behind it and that's the way we've talked about it with the board and that's where we talk about it with outside agencies, that's where we talk about with our general investor class when we have those discussions.
Doug Leggate
Sorry, Andy, to push you on this. What conditions would you see then, how long with this have to go on for you to say we can't do this any longer?
Andrew Swiger
Doug, as I said we put the plan together for 2021 based on our best assessment of the market. It has some contingency on it, some flexibility on it, but were we to run out of that contingency, obviously we'd have to look to pull the next lever.
Doug Leggate
Thank you for that. Can I do my quick follow-up? It's really just about visibility on the disposal front. You talked about $15 billion. You haven't done a whole heck of a lot yet. So, I'm just curious if you can give us any visibility or line of sight as to what you think is a realistic maturation of that disposal plan over the next 12 months? And I'll leave it there. Thank you.
Jack Williams
Yes. Thanks, Doug. I'll take a shot at that one. We have quite a bit out in the market right now. We talked about, I think 11 out in the market. We're in fairly advanced discussions on a few of these assets.
So, we do think that they're going to have some impact in '21 and '22. As you mentioned, it's a pretty difficult market on asset divestment. We're going to make sure we get value. We have something above our attention value. We are going to be patient. As Andy said, there is very little reliance on that in terms of where we see things in 2021, but we're going to continue to have productive discussions with prospective buyers. And we are seeing good interest.
There is no question, we're seeing good interest. These will make some buyers within their portfolio is pretty nicely. So, we're going to continue on, Doug, in that regard. And again, just stick to the fact that we're going to make sure we get value. The assets, we'll keep them in our portfolio.
Doug Leggate
Thanks very much.
Save us the suspense. What was said?