A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics

On ExxonMobile, natural gas, M&As, and the treasures in our T1-IB database...

Published February 21, 2013 by Mark Bodnar

Is it just me, or do news headlines such as the one below from CBC make you want to drop everything and do some research into ExxonMobil and M&A trends within the natural gas industry?

ExxonMobil's $3B bid for Calgary firm OK’d by Ottawa: Approval clears way for Celtic Exploration's purchase by U.S. giant (CBC)

OK, maybe I'm the only one who gets quite this excited about seeing what info I can find behind the headlines. <sigh> In any case, this is still a good example to highlight the powers of our ThomsonOne-Investment Banking database...

I start off with a quick search for ExxonMobile and Celtic Exploration. This gives me detailed overviews of each company: key financials and ratios, recent market data, ownership breakdown, capital structure, competitors, and more.
Going a bit deeper into the database, I look at the details on this specific M&A deal [Company Views tab - then Deals]. I quickly learn that the acquirer is actually an investor group comprised of ExxonMobile Canada (wholly owned by ExxonMobile Corp.) and Imperial Oil (partially owned by ExxonMobile).

I also learn that the $3B reported by CBC is really $3.1B and is made up of about $2.7B in equity value, with the remainder in debt and working capital obligations, plus shareholders of Celtic get half shares in the resulting new company.
Wanting to know where this $3.1B deal fits among M&As happening in the energy and power industry globally and in Canada, and among deals anywhere where natural gas is involved, I start running searches of M&A activity [Screening & Analysis tab].

Interesting to see the long- and short-term trends in number and value among deals involving natural gas firms as targets. Seems like there was a peak in the first couple years after the economic crisis of 2008. If I had more time, I'd run these numbers against various types of economic data, as well as against the price of natural gas and other energy sources. (All of which are in the same database.) But I'm out of time for now...

I did something similar (though more in-depth -- I must have had more time or energy when I was younger) around the KinderMorgan/El Paso merger a couple years ago. My post on that exploratory search highlights many other aspects of this valuable database.

Care to learn how to use the power of ThomsonOne-Investment Banking? Just let me know: Mark Bodnar (mbodnar@sfu.ca).