Matthieu Favas
speaker
190 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 12 Aug
Matthieu Favas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the estimates we've got from a number of sources suggest that these trio, BP Shell and Total, this year could earn in between 15 to 20 billion dollars in profit, which might be one fifth of their profits.
And this might add up to a third to their return on capital.
So
Something that shareholders will like a lot.
Trading profits alone explain why the Europeans have outperformed the American majors so far this year, since the crisis in particular, since February.
Why should that be?
It's largely a product of history and geology.
So the American majors, they've always had access to vast resources in the ground.
They have a lot of oil and gas.
They also have a vast domestic market that they can sell to.
So they can take advantage of both.
The Europeans, they don't have that, neither of these things.
So what they've had to do pretty much since the formation is to go abroad and produce the barrels there and then distribute it to the global market.
which worked fine until the 1970s, when there was a wave of nationalizations in the Gulf, in the Middle East, and they lost access to this oil.
So they had to go abroad and buy barrels from somewhere else.
So BP did it first, essentially discovered that it could buy the barrels it didn't need and resell them at a profit in the 1980s.
And then in the 1990s, Shell and Total did it then because oil prices were pretty low.
They needed to boost their returns and they thought that was a way maybe to diversify.
The secret sauce of these trading operations is the intelligence, the information they can harness from the vast operations of the mothership.
So the majors are huge companies.
Showing 121–140 of 190 · page 7 of 10
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