Stock price when the opinion was issued
They have a hostile bid from Suncor (SU-T). They own the same asset, Syncrude, an oil sands producer. This has been down over the last few years because the price of oil has gone down, also the whole oil sands situation and the difficulty in getting it to market. There is likely a higher bid forthcoming. Dividend yield of 2%.
Should the offer from Suncor (SU-T) be accepted? He thinks Suncor is going to do a better job with those assets than Canadian Oil Sands. This is very opportunistic of Suncor to be doing this at this time. Doesn’t expect there will be a better offer coming. There aren’t a lot of companies that can buy an asset this size.
100% correlated to the price of oil, and he is not bullish on the price of oil. This is the biggest part of Syncrude, which keeps having operational problems. Thinks Suncor (SU-T) wants to buy this and become the majority owner of Syncrude, throw Imperial Oil (IMO-T) out as an operator, and run it themselves. He would tender to Suncor’s offer.
Good, solid investment in oil. From his perspective, it is a bit of a capped investment. Growth in oil production is relatively muted here. Doing expansions at Syncrude but it is basically buying a piece of it. Syncrude has been kind of stagnant in terms of where it’s at for the last 5 years. Maintenance capital expenditure for the last 10 years has been much higher than had been expected. Has no problem with the company, but just don’t look for a lot of growth out of it.