【出版时间及名称】：2010年1月美国石油开采设备行业研究报告
        【作者】：瑞士信贷
        【文件格式】：pdf
        【页数】：54
        【目录或简介】：
Dividend Confidence Grows on Swiss Tax Law
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It’s back to basics for the drillers. Following the recovery, the offshore
drilling stocks have moved back consistent with their historical drivers—
dayrates and utilization trends. We believe commodity price momentum
alone won’t be enough to generate alpha in 2010. We anticipate shares will
have more of a range-bound year given capacity headwinds, which will
likely put pressure on dayrates into 2011. We are seeing signs of dayrate
pressure in even tight markets such as the ultra-deepwater floater market.
On Friday, Upstream reported that ENSCO (ESV) was the apparent low
bidder on an ultra-deepwater rig tender for Petrobras at a dayrate of $380K
on the ENSCO 7500 semi, which was said to be 20% below other
competitive bids. In this soft dayrate environment, we favor companies
poised to generate superior free cash flow.
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Free cash flow set to expand in coming quarters. Despite the decline in
offshore dayrates and utilization trends, we expect the industry to generate
meaningful free cash flow between 2010 and 2012 as newbuild capex
declines and operators benefit from high-margin term contract exposure,
particularly in the floater market.
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OFS investors like dividends. While anticipation of changes in dayrates
has been one of the key drivers of the stocks historically, the market has
rewarded companies that have established dividend programs with
premium valuations relative to the peer group. Diamond Offshore (DO) and
Seadrill (SDRL) have outperformed peers on the basis of their support for a
dividend program, and we believe that free cash flow generating peers
Transocean (RIG) and Noble Corporation (NE) could possibly follow suit,
as their capital expenditure-intensive newbuild programs wind down.
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Changes in Swiss Tax law make it more favorable for companies such
as RIG and NE to return meaningful cash to shareholders. In October,
we raised our target price objective on Transocean (RIG) to $108 per share
citing the potential shift to a cash dividend policy in 2010, which we felt
would support multiple expansion. Changes in Swiss Tax law (Corporate
Tax Reform II) in 2011 should improve the tax efficiency of dividends for
companies such as RIG and NE that redomesticated to Switzerland by
allowing the tax-free return of additional paid-in capital to shareholders.
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Dividend math. Based on anticipated debt maturities of $1.2 billion, $2.1
billion, and $2.2 billion from 2010-12, we believe RIG could fund a $3 to $4
per share annualized dividend in 2010, potentially rising to $5 to $6 per
share in 2011-12. We caution that RIG hasn’t paid a recurring dividend
since 2002 and would require shareholder approval at its AGM in May 2010
before restarting the dividend. We believe NE could support a dividend of
$2.00 to $2.50 per annum, but we are more skeptical that NE will shift to a
more meaningful dividend program given the Board’s focus on growth.