After Donald Trump’s “liberation day” on Wednesday last week, BP lost almost a quarter of its market value in a share price rout even deeper than the oil giant endured in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The collapse in global oil prices in the wake of the US president’s tariff blitz may have wiped billions from its market value – but Trump isn’t BP’s only problem.
The oil company will face shareholders this week for the first time since it bowed to investor pressure to abandon its green energy ambitions in favour of a return to fossil fuels, and its chair, Helge Lund, agreed to step down from the board.
The twin retreats were considered the only defence against the advance of an aggressive activist investor fund that could spell the breakup of the 115-year-old company, which has been haemorrhaging value for years.
Elliott Asset Management, a feared New York hedge fund notorious for shaking up laggard companies, amassed a substantial stake in BP earlier this year. It has reportedly been in talks with key investors over the future of BP after its ill-fated plan to become a green energy company.
The resignation of Lund will not spare the board the embarrassment of a bloody nose from shareholders, many of whom are likely to protest by voting against the chair’s reappointment even though he has already decided to leave.
The board may also take some relief in knowing that its greatest climate activist foe, the shareholder campaign group Follow This, has decided not to put forward a resolution calling for greater emissions cuts at the upcoming annual shareholder meeting amid growing investor antagonism over ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues.
BP set out the plan to reduce its fossil fuel production under former chief executive Bernard Looney in late 2020, the year before its industry rivals began raking in bumper profits from rocking global oil and gas markets.
At the same time, BP’s plan to invest in low-carbon energy projects, including two giant offshore windfarms in UK waters, were dealt a blow by the soaring cost of borrowing and post-pandemic supply chain bottlenecks that pushed costs higher across the industry.
After Looney’s humiliating exit from the company in late 2023, his successor, former finance chief Murray Auchincloss, began to water down the green plans. He set out a “fundamental reset” of BP’s strategy, blaming the company’s “misplaced” optimism in the green transition.
But BP’s pivot back to fossil fuels may already be floundering. The oil company told investors on Friday that its first-quarter results for the year would include lower than expected gas production figures and a “weak” trading result.
Worryingly, the company revealed that net debt surged by $4bn (£3bn) in the first three months of the year, as fears over the global financial uncertainty reached fever pitch.
BP is considered more exposed to the fallout of Trump’s tariffs, which caused market prices for oil to plummet from almost $75 a barrel to under $60 for the first time in almost four years, due to fears that a trade war will tip the global economy into recession and shrink the world’s appetite for crude.
Already, the company appears to have been harder hit by the sell-off than its rivals in the US and Europe. Since the start of the year its share price has plummeted by almost 17%, while Shell has lost just over 8% and US rivals ExxonMobil and Chevron have lost about 7% each.
Equity analysts at investment bank UBS downgraded their view of the company from “buy” to “neutral” after warning that the fall in oil and gas prices could slash BP’s earnings over the coming years by as much as a fifth.
BP’s strategic reset “was an important first step to restore investor confidence, in our view”, said UBS equity analyst Joshua Stone. “The next steps, including a reduction of net debt and replenishment of the reserves base, were always going to take longer to achieve, but the level of financial uncertainty in the market makes delivery harder in our view, especially as it relates to BP’s ability to grow earnings and sell assets.”
