It is very depressing nowadays to work in the oil-and-gas services industry. Massive layoffs all around us, Schlumberger cut 30,000 jobs out of a total of 120,000, Halliburton and Baker Hughes combined cut 27,000 jobs, Weatherford cut 20,000 jobs out of 56,000, ION cut 50% or more of its workforce, Chevron and Shell cut thousands of positions globally, Cameron, CGG, Devon Energy, Marathon Oil, BP, Noble Energy, the list goes on and on. It is not pretty to look at the stock values either, CGG stock went from a high around $37 several years ago to $0.85, ION from $200 to $8, PGS from $96 to $20, the whole sector is in a bloodbath.
If you type in Google “Schlumberger” the second auto-completion item is “Schlumberger layoffs”, it seems it is a very popular search.
Word on the street is that most of the service companies these days survive on their Mexico spec data programs, I counted at least 6 different projects, there are probably some others that I don’t know:
1. Schlumberger, PGS, Spectrum in partnership on 2D and 3D data.
2. TGS 185,000 of 2D seismic lines.
3. CGG.
4. MCG.
5. Dolphin, with the Norwegian holding company now in bankruptcy, not clear what will happen here.
6. GXT.
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