Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Bumface
It's funny how industry members and investors latch so firmly onto trends. For a while everyone was selling their buildings and divesting mid and downstream businesses so they could "focus" and achieve higher valuations, as that was the investing trend of the day. "Pure Play" companies. The pinnacle was EnCana deciding that oil and gas also needed to be split up to get ultra specializes ln one geographic region and one resource, and creating Cenovus.
Oops, turns out it's rather nice to have diverse streams of income for when one aspect of your business ####s the bed. Queue Encana getting back into oil almost immediately. Now Cenovus wants to get further downstream to reduce risk.
Think back to when most of the Canadian companies were heavily geographically diversified. AEC, Nexen, Petro Canada all had sizable global operations that would have been handy when transport became an issue domestically.
It's taken amazing mismanagement to dismantle what was once an international centre of business for a decent chunk of the industry.
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In my experience, you just hand some external consultants a giant bag of money... Then you restructure, do layoffs, etc. 5 years later somebody new hits the c-suite, consultants tell you to restructure back to the old way. The consultants always win!
