My thoughts:
Starts at the top, a very weak board of directors that
1- Allowed too many former major oil company senior leaders to be hired. This changed the culture into a majorly inefficient oil company.
2- Approved the over valuing of too many onshore resource acquisitions.
3- Kept senior leaders too long when the performance of the company faltered.
Noble was a great company until they had their best and largest discovery being Leviathon. Up until then, it definitely felt like a family-oriented business. Then, the mistakes started lining up. You can't put everything on DS, but the definitely the lion share was him and his executive staff.
The major issues was the following:
#1 Passing on the Freeport-McMoran GOA assets that we fit perfectly into our portfolio. Their acreage was adjacent to ours and seismically and geologically understood these assets better than starting over somewhere else
#2 The Marcellus asset, the asset was great, but the contract with the partner was not. Arne should have been fired for this, but I guess others accepted his peeping tom lifestyle.
#3 Getting into and out of Norway in a week. When you realize after having starting up an office in Oslo and find out that you can't make money from the Nords no matter how large the discovery could be. Again Arne should have taken the fall for this as well.
#4 Never should have started up a business unit for Mexico trying to get into the Mexican GOA. We had an office in Mexico City and again it took us 5 years to realize we were never going to make money in Mexico. But, they did a fine job burning up exploration seismic budget
#5 Never should has a business unit in Gabon and Congo.
Point 1 - Even if we drilled a well and had a discovery, Noble had a cross-country border gas asset in Cameroon/EG that went undeveloped even after 15 years after it was discovered because the two countries couldn't agree on unitization. You don't make money if you can't produce what you discover.
Point 2 - When an exploration target is predicted to be fluvial (very disconnected sands) and pre-salt and you are forced my management to call it an oil target when there was no evidence of it to be so
Point 3 - See above to make a decision to pass on it after 3-4 years
#6 The entry into Permian was the fatal flaw out of them all. Mgmt was fleeced from BD that there were up to five potential productive benches when there was actually only one. You think CVX bought Noble for their Permian?
#7 Choose not to add acreage from successful Haynesville and Eagle Ford acreage. In a time when most unconventional wells didn't make money these two assets did, but they wanted the Permian. Great decisions by BD and the Execs.
# 8 Wait 4 years to re-enter the PRB only to re-enter on fringe acreage that no possibility of becoming a viable and productive asset.
Although there are smaller financial blunders they did (i.e. purchase expensive art, Barco rooms that no one used, 3D visualization rooms that no one used except for telecommunications), these 8 were major economic blunders that brought a good company to its knees. Just my 2 cents, but what do I know?
What happened to that Samedan company. They would acquire Chevron GOM blocks and turn them into great producers! Answer- The BP horde took over. They had all the answers.
That is a pretty good list of ten reasons. I have to agree with most of them.
The reasons are many, some are:
Noble didn’t fail. On the contrary, Noble was wildly successful and DS planned to sell to the highest bidder. Everything is for sale for an attractive price.
CVX did not outwit Noble. DS was in the driver's seat and sold out Noble to feather his retirement nest. DS knew exactly what he was doing. It was a great deal for DS and CVX. The people that suffered were the stockholders and employees who had little or no say in the acquisition. When push comes to shove, management clearly could care less about the stockholders or the employees. If Noble had not been sold out, it would still be a thriving oil and gas company today.
I can't believe they failed! I guess not enough mo--ns at the GAP International seminars!
Nobel consistently did the wrong thing. You could count on it!
Panic sale that looked bad at the time and looks even worse now. People openly laugh it when the deal comes up. NBL was clearly outwitted by CVX.
What about all that break through thinking?!
Noble did not fail. It was sold out.