Slowly but surely, Infrastructure for Taxes has been positioning itself as one of the industry’s main opportunities to positively impact Colombia’s rural areas. Politicians highlighted the development of its first project from the oil and gas industry using this program. Our Bottom-Line returns to the theme of local and elite communications as it applies here.
… especially about the future. Our omnipotent Managing Editor has graciously given the Analyst one more week to complete his methodology analysis of Colombia-focused share prices. We promise. Hopefully. Or maybe the Analyst will be fired.
I was in Canada over the year-end holidays and got to spend a lot of time watching television sports (a favorite pastime). That also meant I watched a lot of commercials which, these days, means watching a lot of ads for the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
We try to stay away from share price-related issues. There are lots of commentators better suited for that activity. But we do look at share prices in aggregate as an indicator of investor faith in Colombia. Doing that means we need to ‘unpack’ the influence of various performance drivers including oil prices, other broad industry factors, company-specific factors and to get, finally, the influence of Colombia itself.
A suicide car bomb exploded in Bogotá’s police training academy last Thursday morning. Casualties stand at 21 dead and 68 injured (these may change). The Attorney General attributed the attack to the ELN and on Friday night, President Duque terminated discussions with the guerrilla group.
We updated our indices of Colombia-focused, publicly-traded companies and as expected, the slide in Brent had a noticeable impact. We also looked more closely at our composite index, especially the role of the TSX.
It is early January and time for my annual look ahead. The working title for this piece is always “Fearless Forecasts” but this year I am rather fearful.
Colombia-focused oil companies dutifully did their 2019 planning, a meticulous process requiring formal Board approval, which can take many months to complete. But at the beginning of October, Brent started to slide nearly 37%, from US$84.16 on October 5th to US$53.21 on December 28th, although it was up considerably last week (Jan 4th) to US$57.06.
The Constitutional Court has been active lately, addressing a number of important issues like the apparent legal conflict between the central government’s ownership of the subsoil resources and local communities’ rights to determine what happens on the surface. We were talking with Hernán Rodríguez, Partner at Dentons, Cárdenas and Cárdenas about the conundrum and he offered this discussion of so-called ‘Cumaral ruling’ which resolves some issues but introduces others.
Like most everyone else in the industry, Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) is having a great year financially and statistically. However, the integrated nature of the the NOC means it takes a bit of work to see what is happening in just the E&P business.
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