Fears of crude-price dive drain support from a troubled titan

Robert Lea11 April 2012

Was it the profit miss, nearly a fifth lower in the fourth quarter than forecast? Was it the stalled dividend payout, stuck at 14 cents a share for the third quarter running? Or was it the realisation that the big supermajors like BP find themselves in a global economy of slumping demand and crashing crude prices?

BP's biggest-ever annual profit was today greeted with a near-5% slump in its shares at one stage — a decline of nearly 30% from last year's highs, and a situation which sees the stock yielding a whopping 8%-plus.

This is not a case of better to travel than to arrive, it's the realisation once you've got there that the place is in a shocking state. And today Morgan Stanley became the latest major research house to drastically downgrade its oil-price outlook.

It says the price of oil will tumble to a low of $25 a barrel in the second quarter of this year from the current level of around $40, and will average $35 a barrel over the course of 2009.

Last year, oil demand dived by an average 500,000 barrel of oil a day.Morgan Stanley says this year will be much worse.

"Global demand is poised to post its largest year-on-year contraction since 1982 in a spluttering global economy," it says. "The magnitude of weakness plaguing emerging-market economies — champions of oil demand growth since 2000 — together with continued weakness in OECD (i.e. the world's biggest, mature) economies supports our belief that oil demand will fall by 1.5 million barrels a day in 2009."

Analysts have been fantastically wrong about the oil price over the last year — what did happen to those forecasts of crude plateauing at $200 a barrel from Goldman Sachs, which had previously had the best record in calling last year's superspike?

But if Morgan Stanley is right, BP's earnings will crash 60% this year from 74p a share to 30.8p. That puts huge pressure on its dividend and future capital spending, and lowers the floor at which shareholders will still support this troubled titan.