The oil company is state just after the announcement of its merger with MPI, of disappointing interim results in the context of falling oil prices. Nevertheless, the company is confident and hopes through several transformations, return to profitability by the end of the year.
The title of the French oil company Maurel et Prom is up this morning at the Paris Stock Exchange: at noon, the action was gaining 0.6%, while the CAC fell 0.06%. The company nevertheless suffered in the first half of a difficult external environment plunging his record in the negative. But the company wants it reassuring and combative morning and managed to convince investors of the rapid return of its profits.
First, Maurel & Prom has taken care to announce its absorption project of his old Nigerian subsidiary, MPI whose group had separated in December 2011, together with the publication of its interim results in demiteinte. This should enable it to strengthen and consolidate its market position. So successful strategy as this move was unsurprisingly very well received by investors and the MPI title also flew him this morning to 6.75% on the Paris Stock Exchange.
This merger should enable cost synergies and tax savings. And the company really needs at this difficult time for oil companies. Indeed, like all its counterparts, Maurel & Prom was hurt by plummeting oil prices and therefore saw their accounts fall into the red in the first half of 2015. Over the first six months of the year, the net loss of group reaches 43.7 million euros against a profit of € 59.3 million last year. Regarding sales, the latter fell to 157.8 million euros against 295.5 million a year ago.
Despite this bad biannual report and a price per barrel of oil that shows no sign of improvement, Maurel & Prom does not address the second part of the year defeatist. To head out of the water, the oil group plans to drastically reduce its investments by abandoning such its mining projects in Peru and Mozambique. Moreover, the oil company also plans to halve its investments and production development through the first half and no new exploration drilling is planned by December.
With all this restructuring, the group believes that it will have positive results in the second half 2015. These optimistic expectations on the part of the French group are based on a barrel of Brent at $ 50 for the rest of fiscal year 2015. Nevertheless, a slight wobble could turn the tide completely showing much uncertainty over the group accounts: "A downward variation of 5 dollars of our assumptions would result in a negative cash variation of € 12 million second half of 2015, "warned Maurel et Prom this morning.