Shell Share Discussion Threads

[lippy4] 01/8/2022 20:24

when its the governments fault with their energy policy!!

[jrphoenixw2] 01/8/2022 19:12

Spud/2335:
'If that does come to pass, then I think you’ll see head office relocations. After all, If there’s no stable investment environment, why would companies continue to invest?'

Why would they indeed. Furthermore, how can they when our own government have blocked such an investment environment (Cambo, onshore wind etc).

Jeez is it any wonder the UK (in fact the EU and more widely) are going through an energy crisis. The govt halted domestic energy development in order to appear green. At the same time it decommissioning it's own nuclear back-up (as did Germany earlier). Putin having spotted this glaring weakness then stuck the knife in. Surprise!! Not.

The answer? The govt blames the energy companies and threatens to windfall tax them/us - hahaha!

[charggg] 01/8/2022 11:44

Cheers adg. Hopefully they raise dividends back to at least 47c per quarter after Q3 and Q4 quarters of buybacks. What use of the buybacks if they raise only to say 35c or so. Especially if the oil and gas price environment changes for the worse in later quarters, they will have another excuse to not raise the dividends, and buybacks would be underwater. Agree with you regarding huge value in Shell, unfortunately can't see £50 per share being hit or anywhere near it. Only way can see it happening is via what Dan Loeb of Third Point suggested I.e. Breaking up Shell. We could get £20 per share for Upstream and refining, and another £30 per share for LNG, renewables, etc. Hopefully in the the way Thungela was spun off from Anglo-American.

[charggg] 01/8/2022 10:04

Exactly. Moving tax residence to USA from UK would be a start. In the US, managements live and die by the sword if they think about cutting dividends for major companies. There are Board room and management consequences for such decisions in the US, while on the European side its business as usual for the management teams to just cut dividends blaming something else for their poor decision making and foresight skills. Cutting dividends and not raising it back shows the attitude of Shell's management which is about mass pleasing, as people suffer due to high oil and gas prices. These same people were laughing at Shell's fall from grace and rooting for Shell's demise in 2020, after Shell's management cut the dividend.

[spud] 01/8/2022 07:53

If that does come to pass, then I think you'll see head office relocations. After all, If there's no stable investment environment, why would companies continue to invest?spud

[jrphoenixw2] 31/7/2022 20:39

Agreed Spud, but then with a government ready to launch a pogrom on any PLC making '''excess profits''', what is a profitable company to do?

[nk104] 30/7/2022 23:18

It's not an accurate comparison.

The old system was the basic pension plus state additional pension. In many cases this comes to more than £200 a week. I doubt very much that these people would want to be shunted on to the new system. The country also doesn't have the money to give 'heads I win, tails you lose' to a generation that has done very well out of the welfare state.

Obviously they had 40 years to save if their only income was likely to be the basic pension.

[spud] 30/7/2022 23:16

jr - There are so many flaws associated with buybacks that it's almost akin to a busted flush. And don't get me going on the implementation costs inherent and payable to the brokers buying the damn things back!spud

[lippy4] 30/7/2022 20:27

the majority are on the old pension which if given the new pension to us we could pay the heating costs..

its a couple of thousand a year so what a difference it would make...

[xxxxxy] 30/7/2022 20:12

SIR – There are nearly 12 million pensioners in the United Kingdom (roughly 20 per cent of the population).The new full state pension is £185.15 a week, just over £9,500 a year, but many millions on the previous scheme are of the old-school resilient breed, managing to cope on even less than that, while mystifyingly people earning in excess of £30,000 a year claim they need food banks to survive.If they are struggling, pensioners like me and millions of low-paid workers will not survive the winter should domestic energy bills jump to a third and possibly half of our income.The presently rudderless Government needs to take urgent action now, otherwise the new prime minister is likely to face civil unrest, previously unseen in the normally docile British electorate.... Daily Telegraph

[loganair] 30/7/2022 19:38

I understand the way share buy backs are done is that a company gives its brokers a certain amount of cash then tells the broker to just buy back the shares which the broker does irrespective of the share price or how high the share price goes.

The higher the oil price, the more money an oil company makes and therefore the higher the share price.

What I would like to see is for Shell to keep this cash until the oil price falls, then the share price will fall then to buy back the shares.

[jrphoenixw2] 30/7/2022 19:26

Loganair 2310:
'When it comes to share buy backs I would like the management to say for example they'll only buy back share when the share price is below £20.'

I can see your point but I can perhaps see reasons why it isn't possible:
- Like creating a hard peg on a currency it invites the peg to be fought. Refer back to the Pound being spat out of the ERM in 1992
- I could also believe that announcing a BB ceiling level would be considered market manipulation

I think the terms of the BB have to remain publicly vague for them to have a hope of any success. As frustrating as it is for we shareholders.

[xxxxxy] 29/7/2022 20:51

Mr Lovelock's goddess Gaia is a hero to extreme greens. So it was with shock that they learnt that he disagreed with a lot of green stuff. He told The Guardian in 2016 that trying to heat your home with biomass was expensive and dirty, fracking for shale gas made sense, nuclear power was essential, and computer models of the climate were not reliable. And of the green movement, he said: "Well, it's a religion. It's totally unscientific."He went on: "I'm afraid the thing gets exaggerated out of all proportion, and the greens have behaved deplorably instead of being reasonably sensible."... Daily Telegraph

[charggg] 29/7/2022 16:46

And at oil price of $55-60 per bbl, Shell generates about $7bn per quarter as seen in q2 2021. What is the use of reducing debt from $75bn to $46bn if you can't raise and sustain old dividend levels? And that $7bn FCF is of course after capex. So 50% of FCF is $3.6bn per quarter which is equivalent to 50c dividend per quarter. Double the current dividend level. Even bp pays out 50% of FCF if not mistaken?This management needs to be sent home packing by big hedge funds to run some green vanity project company instead of an oil and gas company.

[spud] 29/7/2022 16:22

Paying an increased dividend doesn’t help the directors hit their share bonus targets which are inextricably linked to an increased eps.

Guess what buybacks do to eps?

spud

[lippy4] 29/7/2022 15:53

surely with the money they have made they could have done a bit of both.

[lippy4] 29/7/2022 11:12

the same thing happened with the supermarkets huge profits..

nothing was said except the md of a supermarket saying the oil companies should give theirs back to the consumer..

[spud] 29/7/2022 10:50

river - They'd probably go pop if they did so yes, I would complain!

spud

[tornado12] 29/7/2022 10:39

Look to the big special DIVI NATWEST is giving out in news today. No one up in arms about those billions they are paying out....... but then the government owns 50% so thats all right then. In my opinion O&G based in UK should move to more logic & business friendly locations like US.

[riverman77] 29/7/2022 10:15

For those knocking buybacks consider this - if the company bought back all the shares in issuance except yours, then you would own the entire company. Don't think you'd complain about them then.