Size isn’t everything for PetroChina jettisoning assets
GOING on a diet and taking exercise can be a great route to fitness, but only if you make real changes rather than just lying to yourself. There’s a lesson in that for PetroChina. The state-backed giant on Wednesday posted its smallest half-year profit since a 2000 listing as falling oil prices, narrowing refining margins and the lower cost of domestic gas squeezed every major segment of its business. In line with almost all its peers at home and abroad, returns on PetroChina’s capital just keep heading south, even as crude rebounds from its January lows.
There’s an exception, though — Sinopec. In terms of return on capital, it’s been doing a better job than even Exxon Mobil of late, thanks largely to a drastic reduction in net debt over the past 18 months.
A big part of that comes from the array of assets that have been moved into affiliated companies. Sinopec Finance, Sinopec Oilfield Service, Sinopec Engineering and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical are just some of a bewildering army of affiliates that now give investors the opportunity to make discrete bets on Sinopec’s distribution of refined products in Shandong province, or its expertise in oil-well-drilling bits.
Investments in affiliates are equivalent to about 7.5 per cent of Sinopec’s total long-term assets, more than double the 3.5 per cent at PetroChina.
Moving assets into obscure off-balance-sheet entities has an understandably mixed reputation post-2008. But bloated, sprawling giants like China’s state-owned oil companies could do a lot to improve the performance of their core businesses and reduce costs in a weak market by spinning off peripheral operations, so it’s about time PetroChina’s parent is finally getting in on the act.
China National Petroleum Corp, the state-owned group with an 86 per cent controlling stake in PetroChina, earlier this week announced plans to inject its financial assets, including a bank stake, into China-listed shell firm Jinan Diesel Engine. In May, asphalt and lubricating-oil maker Xinjiang Dushanzi Tianli High & New Tech, another CNPC-owned shell, struck a deal to buy some of CNPC’s engineering assets.
CNPC also plans to sell its oilfield-services operations, which if jettisoned as an independent company probably would be the world’s fourth-biggest such business by revenue. Shenzhen-traded petrochemical firm Daqing Huake might make a decent shell. If PetroChina’s planned spinoffs really turn it into a leaner, meaner state-owned enterprise, there will be much to welcome. But it’s hard to believe this government-run leopard is about to change its spots.