https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-mitsubishi-exploring-sale-options-their-stakes-lng-canada-sources-say-2026-01-16/
Ok so you’ve got an asset with cost of supply advantage , so much so you want to double its throughput… what should you do with it ???
I know!! I know!! DILUTE your ownership to buy my shares!!!!!!
@OP Shell he-l sell ll
dilution has a very specific meaning related to stock
if you mean that wael is selling assets we will never get back and can never replace, and that we will never invest in making any new ones ever again, all in order to boost EPS because that’s how he gets his bonus, then i agree
Same-Playbook Sawan is turning to dilution to raise cash to preserve buybacks and meet performance compensation metrics.
@kv
That's kind of how conglomerates , subsidiaries, and holding companies work... they have ownership in a lot of SEPARATE companies. Or they make JV ownership.
Shell is in JV's. Shell is a holding company. Shell has subsidiaries.
Not all are oil and gas sector but more are Oil and gas, some are service companies, some real estate, some technology, some power distribution, some batteries, some shipping, some trading. There are some oddities in there that have nothing to do with oil and gas.
@j1 I didn’t, hindsight is a wonderful thing.. if we all had it we wouldn’t be wasting our time here, we would have bought apple, nvidia etc and be living on a tropical island. You can’t as CEO go buying other company shares en masse, investors in Shell and shareholders expect the value from Shell or they are free to buy other shares.
Try to remember that the market cap only loosely represents the company's value. The assets could be worth more than the market cap. That's when corporate raiders come in and sell the company for parts.
YL might be avoiding a hostile takeover by making sure Shell has no assets of value. Think about it, who'd wanna buy shell? There was that activist investor group who wanted to spin off the renewables, but Shell management has cleverly made that asset worthless. All the unconventonal stuff in the US has been sold at fire sale prices. And they bought into a larger fraction of Mars... Now the vestigial dying husk is left. Crisis averted, Nobody would buy Shell for parts. It is not a value company, not a growth company, not a finance company, and not a technical company.
i’m happy for you! i will do the same.
annual bonus in feb, stock march 1st. have a few interviews lined up. can’t wait to turn my laptop in.
i think people hoping for severance are making a mistake. the market will be destabilized by ai in late 2026.
@k6 well in order to make money in chemicals you need to invest or have world class facilities. Only one site in chemicals makes money. The saying has been Shell makes money in spite of itself. Shell does not know how to run downstream assets period!
YL made that comment in the town hall after stating chemicals was either going to be sold or made a JV. I’m honestly happy I’ve left the company and found greener pastures.
by the way I forgot to mention, when he was in the room with trump and all of the other oil executives discussing venezuela, he acted like shell was interested in pursuing work there
bwahahahah shell can’t even afford vending machines anymore, sit the he-l down you lying sycophant, you don’t buy anything unless it’s stock with company money
that’s d-mb and shortsighted
in a townhall in the US last year, somebody asked what we do to make money when the price of a barrel does down since we sold all of our refineries. YL said we use chemicals.
you can’t make up how poorly this company is run. business lines are not little black boxes where money goes in and more money comes out at all times. a company is a complex system and that includes bets that only pay off on rainy days. selling chemicals is like cancelling your health insurance and hoping you don’t ever get sick so you can make more money each month
in 10 years it will be obvious to all that YL
bled shell out like a pig to make his bonus EPS targets, causing irreparable damage. loss of things and opportunities we can never get back for any price. all whole acting like a big man at davos and talking about how we “may change our risk appetite” in every town hall. yeah right man, you haven’t taken a single risk during your entire tenure and are still pressuring people to be even more risk adverse on spend.
what are you missing? plenty. since oil and gas stocks are cyclical, they rise and fall without any intervention. and so, you need to benchmark them against their peers or the price of oil to see if they are above market.
second, the same money could be in tech stocks and 10x or 100% guaranteed bonda and still pay that 4%
shells investment prop is awful. the investors are all old clueless fogies. YLs strategy is nothing more than permanently shrinking and cutting while maintaining the dividend and trying to hide it with pep talks about working hard and value. facts.
@j0 I did look it. The market cap has been flat for the three years of Wael’s.
@ha
You deliberately missed the point didn't you? Yes, share buy backs are publicly announced, yes they are cancelled and do not add to the market cap.
That's why people are saying it is a a bad investment. Buying anything else would have added to the market cap and could be resold.
You claim YL explained he didn't have a better option, but the point is that anything would have been a better option.
Yes, the market cap has gone down since before the pandemic. The market cap has generally gone up since the pandemic craziness. Look it up instead of making it up.
@ep no that simple - when you buy back shares you cancel them, so don't expect the buy back $ to be added to the market cap (which is the share price x number of shares). Shell has bought back and cancelled about 30% of its market cap - helps then also in terms of maintaining dividend pay-out as its less. EPS goes up even with same profits.
These claims of trying to hide shrinkage etc are not true - the buy backs are not hidden, are out there for all to see, in analysts sessions Wale has been repeated asked and has explained reasoning - no secrets. You might not like that he doesn't have more lucrative options, sure - but balance sheet is the strongest it has been for a long time, BG debt paid down etc
@h0
But they didn’t buy any indexed funds, just shell shares hahahaha
@en Shell’s market cap has not declined on wael’s watch.
@ep the last few years in the Chemicals Town Hall, Emma has basically stated that from a chemicals standpoint. Why would Shell keep giving money to chemicals when they couldn’t get a return, when they could have put that $1B in an index fund and gotten a return. Like you said, though Shell hasn’t really tried to grow at all and most of the businesses Shell is in are not top of class, so they are hemorrhaging money.
@en you hit the nail on the head.
@en
Saying it quickly:
They spent $75 billion to shrink quietly and hide the shrinkage instead of spending $75billion and growing.
Buying any stock market index would have had a better return and could have been the growth, even despite leadership giving away our opportunity to stay the same size or grow.
@da
Here's what you are missing, Shell has spent 75billion on share buybacks over the last 5 years where the market capitalization was 320billion before the pandemic. Shell's current market cap is about 220 billion. (I'm being generous here, it is more like 212billion) Shell leadership invested money to mask the fact that Shell is shrinking in an unhealthy way. A healthy company would have spent 75 billion and grown, meaning you'd expect a market cap of greater than 400billion. To be fair, if Shell had bought Exxonmobil stock, Devon, Chevron, or Pioneer stock, it could have covered our dividend with their dividend (plus selling a very small faction of their shares) and increased the market cap to about the 400billion mark. Yes, Shell's exploration did choose well to get into Guyana like they should have, then Shell's leadership literally gave it away. Yes, you could say that we're doing our prospecting on the Stock market....but failing because we're buying Shell stock.
So per-share things look ok and maybe even good; but on a company wide perspective instead of growing by 25%, they shrank 30%.
Or from a dividend perspective they could have increased the dividend by $7/ year and paid out $35/share more over that time. A $60 share paying a dividend of about $9.85... well I'd speculate that the higher dividend would have raised the share price.
The way I look at it is that they took the cowardly way and tried to hide the shrinkage. And that choice was one of the worst they could make. Investing in just about anything even other oil stocks ( except BP... that is worse than shell), or a 50%total stock market index and 50% Us bonds would have covered the dividend and accounted for inflation. ( just like Bill Bengen's 4% rule) By the way, the 4% rule showed that in the worst scenario of the last 100 years one could withdraw 4% with annual increases for inflation for at least 30 years; but in most cases you could withdraw 5-6% and have that in perpetuity or 30 years.
Stock price up 30% over the 3 years WS has been CEO (let’s call it 10% p.a.). Dividend runs 4% p.a. That’s not so bad. What am I missing?
Indeed, would be ok if you thought, hey let’s sell a share of this asset to fund other value creating ventures, but no, money will be blown on share buy backs. Shouldn’t be surprised though, YL has said he doesn’t see any better investment than buying shares.