In the simplest of terms why do people buy shares in Cenovus? Is it for refineries where we are a bottom quartile operator? Is it for Deep Basin assets where our land base is too gassy and the overhead is too high compared to our peers. People buy shares in this company because it’s a top tier upstream SAGD producer with high quality assets. Sell the distractions and keep the top tier assets.
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Announcing you are building a new corporate building in Ohio and hiring a tremendous amount of overhead does not give shareholders confidence. Announcing expensive sponsorships does not give shareholders confidence. It does tell shareholders they aren’t likely to get any returns.
Take a swipe and your standards and look at how ridiculous they are - it takes you a year to update any standard because there are so many non value added steps and processes built in. Make your organization as lean as possible and trust seasoned employees to do their jobs well without 27 signatures to change a light bulb vendor. No industry can survive operating the way you do. No agility and opportunities to save money pass you by for being to slow. I deal with selling to oil and gas companies and this is by far the worst I’ve seen.
I do think that the Cenovus executives don’t have the grit and realistic business acumen to make money in refining. I haven’t seen any good changes or decisions yet. Huge disappointment and it looks like the shareholders agree.
In simpler terms cenovus hired a senior VP of downstream that is and has been an absolute joke of a leader as she was at Suncor. Why does she demand hiring millions and millions in consultants to go to the refineries and produce nothing? It’s suspicious to say the least - maybe to get her own perks while downstream fails. Fire her and her Dublin Ohio friends please! There’s your win!
Cenovus’s strategy to manage refineries - build office in Dublin, Ohio - a high cost of living suburb hours from any refinery. Hire expensive suits to do nothing but sit on teams calls all day contributing zero. Build a useless building you don’t need so the suits can sit in expensive digs and still contribute nothing. Send millions of dollars in consultants to tell you what the refineries already know. Pay for and Send airplanes full of refinery supporting staff to fly to Calgary and back constantly to sit and stare at more suits for no reason, other then to interfere with the work they should be executing at the site. Cut costs by pounding on the hourly skilled workers maintaining said refineries by cheapening out on skilled labor and supporting functions to make the sites run well. Demand these workers cut things like ten minute rest breaks and eating lunch. Furlough maintenance crews to save money?! Id--tic at best. Hire dozens and dozens of new grad engineers to sit at refineries and require baby sitting by the senior and seasoned people that should be solving problems. This saves a few bucks over recruiting a few seasoned refining professionals. Take away the cafeterias. Hire cheap unskilled contractors to do critical maintenance. Then scratch you’re head when there is an outage at a refinery. Can’t you send one of the suits from Dublin to troubleshoot in between golf games? Please sell the refineries. You are an embarrassment to the hard working seasoned people that have the knowledge and expertise to do the job if you stopped interfering.
Um…people don’t buy Cenovus stock…