PIW Ranks the World’s Top 50 Oil Companies

摘要

A period of great instability and anxiety for the oil industry has yet to translate into major changes in the annual PIW Top 50, at least as far as the rankings’ upper echelons are concerned. Consolidation, widely expected after oil prices began falling in mid-2014, has been stymied by the uncertainty created by Opec’s “market forces” strategy, with the result that few big names have been swallowed up in takeovers, and few companies have bulked up by acquiring assets. That is not to say that merger and acquisition (M&A) activity has had no impact, how- ever. The single biggest move within the latest PIW Top 50 reflects one of the biggest corporate takeovers of recent years, Repsol’s $13 billion acqui- sition of Canadian independent Talisman in 2014, which helped catapult the Spanish major seven places higher into 30th position (PIW Dec.22’14). This is its highest ranking since 2011, and follows a few years in the mid- to-high 30s following the shock of the YPF expropriation in Argentina in 2012 (PIW Apr.23’12). PIW’s annual ranking of the 50 largest oil compa- nies is unique in comparing both national oil companies (NOCs) and pri- vate-sector petroleum companies together. The rankings are based on the sum of a firm’s ordinal ranks for each of six operational metrics - oil and gas production, oil and gas reserves, refined product sales and refining capacity. The 2016 rankings are based on 2015 data, the latest annual met- rics available (PIW Nov.16’15).