tjongejonge schreef op 5 mei 2020 13:24:
Earnings Of Big 3 Oil Supermajors Sending Mixed Signals On Demand Recovery
By Investing.com (Haris Anwar/Investing.com)Stock Markets2 hours ago (May 05, 2020 04:56AM ET)
Among the oil supermajors, the biggest disappointment came from Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDSa) which announced, on Thursday, April 30, when it reported Q1 results, that it was drastically slashing its dividend for the first time since at least the Second World War.
Shell will save $10 billion annually as the quarterly payout falls to $0.16 per share from $0.47 previously, with a concurrent drop in yield from 9.89% previously to 4.09% at time of writing. The company’s adjusted net income was $2.86 billion in the first quarter, down 46% from a year earlier.
Shell made this decision because it faces a “crisis of uncertainty” about energy consumption, prices and maybe even about the viability of some of its assets,
Shell Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. The dividend cut was based on “quite a bleak scenario” and “we don’t know what will be on the other side of this pandemic.”
The pandemic will result in lasting changes to the world’s energy consumption and it’s hard to say if oil demand will ever return to levels seen in 2019, van Beurden said. Shell's stock is down 45% since the start of the year.
Bottom Line
The massive cuts made by oil companies show that recovery in oil demand will be a slow and lengthy process. That uncertainty will continue to add risk to their shares even after the significant pullbacks during the past two months.