BP chief defends income plunge as board braces for investor turmoil

The chief government of BP has defended its tumbling income because the board braces for a marketing campaign by an activist investor to overtake the troubled oil firm.

Murray Auchincloss reported a pointy hunch in BP’s annual income to $8.9bn (£7.9bn) final yr from virtually $14bn in 2023, simply days after it emerged that the activist hedge fund Elliott Funding Administration has taken purpose on the oil main by constructing a stake within the firm.

The New York-based investor is predicted to make use of its grip on the corporate to demand sweeping adjustments to BP which might embrace ousting the BP chair Helge Lund and a boardroom cull, or a break-up of the 120-year-old firm.

The advance of Elliott, which was first reported by Bloomberg, has come amid rising considerations that BP might turn out to be a takeover goal after a sequence of disappointing monetary outcomes and uncertainty over its inexperienced power technique.

Auchincloss used BP’s annual monetary outcomes to argue that BP had “laid the foundations for development” by “reshaping” its power portfolio in 2024, and would now “basically reset our technique and drive additional enhancements in efficiency”.

The corporate’s income have fallen steadily since international oil and fuel costs reached historic highs in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its earnings fell to $1.17bn for the ultimate quarter of 2024, its lowest quarterly revenue in 4 years and fewer than half the virtually $3bn it reported for a similar quarter the yr earlier than.

Auchincloss is on a mission to right the corporate’s course by discovering $2bn in price financial savings throughout the enterprise and lowering BP’s web debt. He set out plans final month to chop 1000’s of jobs from BP’s international workforce, amounting to five% of its employees, and is predicted to unveil a brand new technique at BP’s investor day later this month.

The corporate has fallen from favour amongst many massive buyers lately since its earlier chief government, Bernard Looney, set a plan for BP to turn out to be a web zero power firm by slashing its oil and fuel manufacturing by the top of the last decade in favour of spending billions on renewable power tasks.