BP p.l.c.
- ISIN GB0007980591
- Land Großbritannien
Unternehmensprofil
Organisationally BP has 4 business segments:
- Exploration and Production
- Gas, Power & Renewables
- Refining & Marketing
- Petrochemicals
Each of these businesses are described below.
Exploration and Production
E&P,activities include exploration, development and production of oil and natural gas. The segment contributes over three quarters of Group profit, and 60% of BP’s E&P profits arise in the UK and USA. BP’s current global production is on average 1.9 million barrels of oil (‘bbls’) and 8.6 billion cu ft of gas per day, which is equivalent to 115% and 95% respectively of the total daily UK consumption of oil and gas.
A majority of BP’s production (except for US natural gas) comes from a relatively small number of large oil and gas fields. Large fields are often disproportionately profitable since exploration, development and operating costs may be only modestly higher than for smaller fields.
BP has one of the best exploration records in the industry. While industry average ‘wildcat’ exploration has a one in four success rate, BP has consistently achieved better than six out of ten in the last several years. In the last six years, BP has participated in more giant field discoveries than any of its major competitors.
The tremendous exploration success over the last few years along with the combination of BP, Amoco and ARCO has created a resource base of new oil and gas fields from which BP plans to grow. Much of this growth will come from 5 new profit centres in the areas of Trinidad, Angola, Azerbaijan, GOM Deepwater and Asia Pacific LNG. Over the next 5 years, more than 50% of the entire capital allocated for investment in the E&P segment is intended to go into these five new profit centres.
The formation of TNK-BP, a strategic partnership formed with the Alfa Group and Access-Renova (AAR) in August of 2003, creates a sixth new profit centre in Russia.
In addition to building new profit centres, BP also continuously strives to maximise productivity in its existing profit centres, the most notable of which are the North Sea, Alaska and North American gas. Productivity is optimised by maximising the economic recovery of barrels from these assets, focusing on capital productivity and by pursuing a best-in-class operating cost structure.
Assets which do not merit investment when compared with the rest of the portfolio are divested, as a part of an ongoing strategy to continuously improve the quality of the portfolio over the long-term.
Refining & Marketing
BP’s ‘downstream’ operations comprise four elements: Refining, Retail fuel and shop sales, Lubricants and Business Marketing which mostly comprises the commercial sales of aviation and marine fuels and lubricants.
In Refining, BP’s key objective is to operate safely an advantaged refining system more profitably than those of its competitors. For BP, advantaged characteristics relate to:
- supply – the refinery’s position in relation to the market
- clean fuels – how the refinery supports our clean fuels strategy
- and integration value – how the refinery adds value by virtue of integration with other parts of the Group’s business
BP retails fuel and, in many cases, everyday convenience items, through 27,800 petrol stations worldwide. Altogether 51% are in the USA and 30% in Europe (including the UK). The group uses the BP and Amoco brand names in the USA east of the Rocky Mountains and ARCO to the west and will keep the Aral name for use in Germany. The group is developing retail sites with large convenience stores that include a café and bakery, which offer freshly prepared foods. Retail shop sales at $5.7bn are only 2-3% of group turnover but carry a higher margin than petrol retailing and are growing quite fast.
Air BP is one of the world’s leading suppliers of fuel and fuel-related services to the aviation industry, with more than 10% of the market. It sells around 0.5 million bbl/day of aviation fuels in 90 countries. Sales grew by over 40% in the four years to 2003, much faster than the market.
Sales of Lubricants are expected to grow significantly following BP’s acquisition of Castrol, which is the market and technical leader for automotive lubricants for the retail consumer and for specialised industrial lubricants. Castrol is also the market leader in marine lubricants and among the leaders for aviation and commercial vehicles. Castrol is currently the third largest marketer of lubricants overall but is gaining market share.
Gas, Power & Renewables
The strategic purpose of the Gas, Power and Renewables segment is to maximize the value of BP’s gas through marketing, to enhance the value of BP’s natural gas liquids production and to build a profitable renewables business.
The segment is organized into four main activities: marketing and trading; natural gas liquids (NGL); new market development and LNG; and solar and renewables.
Our marketing and trading activities are focused on the relatively open and deregulated natural gas and power markets of North America, the United Kingdom and certain parts of continental Europe. In 2003 our sales of natural gas were 26.3 bcf/d, an increase of 22% over 2002.
Our Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) business in North America is engaged in the processing, fractionation and marketing of ethane, propane, butanes and pentanes extracted from natural gas.
New market development and LNG activities involve developing opportunities to capture sales for our upstream natural gas resources, and are conducted in close collaboration with our Exploration and Production business.
Our solar and renewables business activities include the development, production and marketing of solar panels and the development of wind farms on specific company sites. BP Solar is one of the world’s leading producers of photovoltaic solar cells with sales in 2003 of 71 MW. Our 22.5 megawatt wind farm at the Nerefco oil refinery (BP 69%) in the Netherlands sells green electricity into the Dutch national power grid.
Other activities include gas-fired power generation projects, where our principal focus is on projects that will utilize our equity natural gas. Projects that will reduce Group power costs and/or reduce overall emissions are also a key focus area. BP also continues to pursue the development of hydrogen fuel technology.
Petrochemicals
BP Petrochemicals produces over 27 million tonnes pa of petrochemicals and plastics with turnover in excess of $16 billion. It produces intermediate chemicals used in the manufacture of plastics, fibres, pharmaceuticals, solvents, coatings and other products. Petrochemicals is a key part of the BP Group, adding value to the hydrocarbons produced by both BP’s upstream gas and downstream oil businesses.
Petrochemicals accounts for just over 10% of the group’s capital employed, but is in itself one of the three largest petrochemical companies in the world. BP Petrochemicals has been restructured with the aim of improving its performance and it is now positioned as a leading competitor (defined as number 1 or 2) in its chosen products. Increasingly BP will be focusing its Petrochemicals portfolio on 7 competitively advantaged core products being ethylene (and co-product propylene), polypropylene, high density PE, paraxylene, PTA, acrylonitrile and acetic acid. Future plans will involve targeted investment to strengthen BP’s position in these products. It makes these and other closely related products in 32 major plants in the UK, Western Europe, USA, Canada, Brazil and the Far East.
Petrochemicals is a highly cyclical industry earning very good returns at the top of the cycle, but poor returns at the bottom. On average, returns can be expected to be comparable to other BP sectors. The chemicals industry has been operating at or close to the bottom of its cycle over the past 3 years and consequently profit margins throughout the industry have slumped. Despite a good relative performance, return on capital has been disappointing.
By focusing on a distinctive portfolio of products with above average growth potential and good integration value with BP’s other activities, BP Petrochemicals should be well-positioned to take advantage of any upturn in the Chemicals industry.
Other operations
Transport and logistics, referred to as ‘midstream’ businesses, are primarily pipelines and shipping. These are essential but are now a relatively small part of the BP group with the principal consideration being safety rather than profitability.