A bit gloating now that it's official, but I went to Toll's...

A bit gloating now that it's official, but I went to Toll's website a couple of weeks ago... under its acquisition history... 2017 it acquired Toll Mermaid

I assumed most in the market knew that.

Anyway, short term share price I really don' tknow. Maybe the market won't care about it tomorrow. I just breathe a whole lot easier now that it's official they've offloaded the bases, met the bankers' term for that extension.
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2019:

Oil prices crashed around mid to late 2014?
I doubt OPEC or Russia or the western oil companies could afford to keep it low for 5 years by then. This oil crash is not about lack of demand for oil, it's a battle for market share and a geo-political tool against Venezuela and the Russians.

It's also the big oil players' way of doing another "great sweating". That's J D Rockefeller's phrase when he intentionally sweat the pants off of his competitors by flooding the market with oil, crash its price, sent small operators broke then scoop them up for next to nothing.

The Saudis did a similar sweating in the mid 1980s.

This time it's more geopolitics and crashing unconventional shalers, stalling new development and uptake in green energy, high efficiency and renewables. All this to buy time, buy out smaller players and maybe diversify into other energy mix for that coming future.

BUT what if oil stays where it is...

As Jeff Weber said, there are those use it or lose it clause to the offshore fields. It's been almost 3 years since they haven't use it. Better get cracking or lose their license to other players.

So management have to make that cost/benefit analysis of losing the license and all their exploration work and investment; lose rights to that reserves on the cheap, be out of business or taken over or find new finance, new fields etc. etc. when oil eventually pick up.

The lost of that is still less than the loss from just going offshore and pump the minimum required. The scale, to my optimistic eyes, favour drilling it rather than losing it.

So there will be some work there for OSV that survive, somewhat intact, albeit slightly smaller vessel wise, like MRM.

These would manage to please the banks, keep the cash flowing in and out.


Further... if the bankers are already bending over backwards like this to wait MRM and the recovery out for another 2 years and 9 months... arms can be twisted the further it's been since oil crash - i.e. it's been this bad for this long, give us another year or two else you could lose all that hundreds of millions. And look, we've been repaying off a fair bit more principals over the two years since 2017 etc. etc.

Should watch how Murdoch and his over leveraged News empire grab the bankers by the nutsack in the early 1990s.

So i'm not worried about the banks given today's announcement.

Also, there's those offshore wind farm projects that's going to come online soon. COuld be some further cash to be made there for MRM.