RE:Opportunity?
It's tough to crunch the numbers here. They're down to 46k bpd. Take that as the exit rate, what are you pricing in for production for 2025?
That's going to be a 20% drop from what was expected this year. What's the decline for next year?
Also, here was the initial guidance for Llanos, which IMO is the last good 'Big-E' prospect: "The Arantes well is targeting gas and condensate in the high-potential Foothills trend of Colombia, where historical pool sizes are significant, and wells can be extremely prolific. This prospect was spud in early January 2024 with preliminary results expected in H1 2024"
Now they're saying results 'before YE' ... like, WTF is going on here?
Then you have to think about the budget for next year. They cut a fair bit this year and had $50m of Big E, which is now mostly gone. Can they lower the budget further? Or will they double down?
Looking at the math, the dividend does seem well-covered but I don't know if exploration leaves much room for buybacks, so that's out, even though shares are so cheap. So do they take on debt? That's what I would do but who knows.
The communication on company strategy right now is really bad, which is why the best thing would be to punt this CEO, who came in and was like "I didn't join this company to run a 50k bpd company' and now he's wrecked it.