Power Players: Can new BP leadership steady the ship?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Four chief executives and three board chairs since twenty twenty. If I just gave you those stats alone, you'd think we're talking this week about a crisis company fighting for its very existence. But we're talking instead about a firm that just one month ago announced a one hundred and forty four percent rise in its profits for the three months to June, its highest quarterly profit in four years. So what is going on at the energy company BP? What does it tell us about global energy supply and the politics around how we power our homes, businesses and transportation? And is the company that's full name is British Petroleum actually even British anymore?
Yeah, welcome back to Power Players from Business Daily on the BBC World Service. Will Bain here with you today, but flying solo today. No Rahol or Michelle this week. So I've enlisted a little bit of help and gone right to the top to do so. Someone who's covered the world's biggest companies for more than two decades and has spent probably more time than he cares to think about trying to get to the bottom of our central question today of what is going on at BP, one of the world's biggest energy companies. B B C's business editor, Simon Jack. Thanks a bit. Thanks for being with us. Pleasure. How many years then have you been uh doing the wranglings of what's been going on at BP? Well it's been a strange one, BP.
Um because it is, like you say, this is no two-bit company. It's worth ninety billion pounds right now, $120 billion. It's one of the top ten most valuable companies in the FTSE one hundred. So you can't be a business journalist without covering BP. It's absolutely central. Most people own it as part of their pension fund. So even if you don't know you own a few shares of BP, you probably do. So in a way that you've got
We thought even if you don't care about BP, perhaps you're listening somewhere in the world where you're not as OF with this company as as you and I are that's what makes this an interesting story today, right? To sort of lay the table a bit for people. That this is a central issue going on all round the world, right? That we are trying to have, or where there is lots of political push to have more of the green transition going on, changing, moving away from oil and gas more bluntly and everything we Do how we power businesses, travel, homes, etc. But how you do that and still make money as a company, far from a BP only issue, right?
Correct. And uh I w when I talk to a lot of companies who set out their greener ambitions, and not just oil and gas companies, but all companies, what they've told me is that the green transition has not happened as fast as they thought it would. In their nomenclature they say it's all moved right. And what they mean by moved right is it means uh into a time scale which is long much further away than thought. Oil and gas and maximised production of that made more money than those companies who were trying to both finance and make money out of a shift to renewables. And of course all of that was put on steroids by Russia and Ukraine. Oil prices just leapt up and then the oil and gas companies that, you know, were making tons of they couldn't help but make a fortune because the price of what they were getting out of the ground was going up.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:09
2
What is the current state of BP’s boardroom and why has there been so much churn?
4:09–7:42
3
How have recent changes in BP’s chair and CEO positions affected investor confidence?
7:42–12:24
4
What pressure are shareholders putting on BP to accelerate its ESG and green‑energy agenda?
12:24–17:02
5
How does BP’s new chief executive plan to balance profit with the transition to net‑zero?
17:02–22:16
6
Why are activist investors like Mark Van Baal critical of BP’s current strategy?
22:16–25:43
7
Is BP still a ‘British’ company and does its national identity matter to UK investors?
25:43–25:46
Speakers
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