Transcription of Presentation of Woodside Petroleum Limited (ASX:WPL) CEO and Managing Director, Peter Coleman Lelde Smits: What is Woodside Petroleum’s vision and your strategy to achieve it?
Peter Coleman: Woodside Petroleum Limited’s
(ASX:WPL) vision is to be a global leader in upstream oil and gas. That helps us a lot, because it means we need to be competitive on a global basis and it really sharpens us up.
Our strategy is threefold. It’s to maximise the value of our existing world-class assets, mostly located here in Australia. It’s to leverage our very distinctive capabilities that we have, that will continue to allow us to pursue new opportunities. And thirdly, it’s to grow our portfolio and grow that portfolio through either acquisition, or through organic means.
Lelde Smits: Where are your core assets located and how do they support your business?
Peter Coleman: We’re very fortunate our core assets are located off the northwest of Australia. They provide a couple of things for us that make us unique globally. Firstly, they really increase the bar; raise the bar for us with respect to our environmental responsibility, and our health and safety responsibility. So globally, we really compete well in that space already. Secondly though, location to market and proximity to market, they’re very close to our main markets. We are a seller to Asia. We sell bulk energy to Asia and those assets are very well located for that.
Lelde Smits: What are your plans and targets for growing production and enhancing performance?
Peter Coleman: Our plans for growing production are twofold. We have an exploration program that’s very active. It’s both active here in Australia and we move overseas in the second half of 2015. We’ll be drilling wells in South Korea and then some highly prospective regions in Myanmar as well as Cameroon and elsewhere. We’re very active in that space.
In the near term, we’ve got our own growth through drilling wells in our existing fields. And then of course, we’ve got our new Wheatstone project coming on stream in late 2016. And that will add significant growth to Woodside’s portfolio. In the longer term, we’ve just announced we’ve gone into front-end engineering and design on our Browse project. And we hope to go to a final investment decision on that project next year, that’ll be post 2020 growth. So you can see we’ve got a nice staircase of growth coming over the next few years, for our shareholders.
Lelde Smits: Could you outline some of your most recent acquisitions and why they are compelling investments?
Peter Coleman: We’ve been both patient and quite active in the acquisition market. We’ve been patient for a period of time when oil prices were, we felt, quite high and really didn’t meet the global supply and demand situation. Today, we think those prices have probably gone the other way and a little bit lower than the long-term trend. And so we waited for a while, we looked at things very very hard, but we went hard at exploration. And so we’ve accumulated a very nice exploration portfolio over the last two years, around a number of thematic areas, around the Atlantic margin and around some new growth areas for us. More recently, we acquired some assets off Apache Corporation (NYSE:APA) in the US. That gives us access to some new growth in Australia and in some blue-sky growth, in Canada.
Lelde Smits: What has Woodside Petroleum done to adapt to a lower oil price environment?
Woodside’s had to adapt to the lower oil price environment, just like our competitors have. The good news though, is our business plan has really stood up to this test. We have a very robust strategy. We have excellent assets that continue to provide excellent profit for us. And we’re continuing to build growth for the future, invest for the future and take advantage of opportunities that may come up into the marketplace.
So for us, while we’re having to change a few things, the core of what we’re doing is still in place and shareholders can continue to look forward to some really exciting things coming out of Woodside.
Lelde Smits: How are you positioning the company to leverage from opportunities in the oil and gas sector?
Peter Coleman: We’ll be opportunistic when it comes to leveraging opportunities. So we’ll maintain our balance sheet flexibility, that’s been a discipline and commitment that we’ve made. And we’re looking broadly at opportunities around the world. Now, strategy in the short term though, is to aggregate around existing areas. It’s not to create a new beachhead somewhere, but more importantly, it’s to try and build around areas that we already have. We don’t want to stretch ourselves too far, too fast and we recognise our organisational capability, to be able to take on lots of things. We want to make sure that we do that in a sensible way.
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