The earlier poster is correct. Apache has announced a 10-15% headcount reduction across the entire company. Spending is being reduced by $250 million to $500 million. The future of the company may depend on the exploitation results in offshore Surinam.
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What about APACHE'S Central Montana Oil Prospect? They've just drilled about 4 wells that look promising.
Are y'all forgetting we're PREMIER, though? For shame!
Layoffs are the result of bad management decisions. Sometimes they are the result of drastic downward prices in oil and gas commodity prices. That is basically it.
The board, CEO, CFO, and other senior execs have essentially abdicated their fiduciary and oversight duties for 4-5 years running. The so-called bought experts brought in from EOG were a joke. There was zero oversight, no competetnt technical reviews, little budgetary oversight and spending constraints. The CEO especially showed in my opinion almost criminal neglect. Contracts were handed out by the head of SA to buddies, data collected was barely looked at, and the CEO considered this person a technical genius like 'non other'. The latest firing of this useless narcissist is just a last ditch attempt to shun responsibility and foist it on others. Anybody that has 'managed' a company over a 5 year period and lost 69% of its value should fired immediately. The board should start looking into the financial abuse and self dealing that went on. Do your job.
What the CEO allowed San Antonio, and that region's former VP, to do, is unforgivable. As a CEO, you let these outsiders into the company, let them steal whichever projects they want, let them destroy the value in them, let them give the projects back, let them make a major announcement of a discovery without any peer-review from technical experts elsewhere in the company, let them oust whomever they feel threatened by, and let them do it for 5 years, AND you give them all the capital. If any other region sank billions into a play that has a zero percent chance of recouping its costs (let alone making a profit), or treated fellow Apaches the way San Antonio did, then that region would be gone immediately, along with all the personnel. But not San Antonio; they've been allowed to run roughshod over Apache for years. To those of you from SA who will be assimilated into other parts of the company after this re-org, we will do our absolute best to treat you respectfully. But just know that your former leader was an inept coward who had stolen others' work his entire career, who is almost solely responsible for the dire straits we are currently in, and whose departure was the most celebrated event in the last 5 years at this company. Good riddance.
Absolutely.
The CEO should be sacked for two reasons: first, he lacks credibility; second, he lacks leadership ability.
He keeps claiming that profitability is just around the corner, or that this is the year AH will be cash flow positive, or that the company will live within its cash flow, and a myriad of other things. None of them come true. And this is at least the second official re-organization during his almost 5 year tenure (who knows how many people have been quietly removed because they dared to state publicly about AH what virtually everyone knew privately?). Why will this re-organization work if the last one didn’t?
His leadership ability is nonexistent. He lacked the gumption to reign in SA and his career history has been one of appeasement, from promoting his friends to executive positions, handing out vp titles like a priest hands out communion wafers, to going along with the previous CEO’s drill-baby-drill and buy-buy-buy mantra that set the company on its downward path. He continually makes bad and short-sighted decisions. Just look at the continual collapse and downward slide of the stock price since he took over: clearly, no one on Wall Street believes anything he says.
Meanwhile, the board (packed with friends of the CEO) sits on its hands, as they and the executives loot the company from within, collecting obscene compensation packages for substandard results. Their best hope is a buyout, but who would buy a company that is continually selling off its assets and has dwindling drilling inventory?
The company should return to its acquire and exploit model, which was proven and successful. But it lacks the executive team to do that and now the worker bees are going to suffer.
This is a last-ditch effort by the CEO and his executive staff of bankers and accountants to save their sorry hides. He has surrounded himself with yes men who know nothing about what it takes to operate a successful oil and gas E&P company. The existing regime has decimated a once-great company. The best thing that could happen to Apache is a buyout, so the people that made this company can reap the benefits of a COC.