PA5COR
01-28-2016, 12:00 PM
BG Group (BG.L) shareholders overwhelmingly approved Royal Dutch Shell's (RDSa.L) $52 billion takeover on Thursday, clearing the way for the two firms to create the world's biggest trader of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
BG will now merge with Shell on Feb. 15, nearly two decades after the company was born from British Gas and just a few months after it reached record oil and gas output thanks to new projects in Australia and Brazil.
At a meeting in London, 99.53 percent of BG shareholders voted in favor of the merger, a day after 83 percent of Shell's shareholders approved the deal first announced on April 8 last year.
Shell shareholders are putting their faith in CEO Ben van Beurden's decision to focus the Anglo-Dutch company's operations in liquefied natural gas (LNG) and deep water oil production over the coming decades as the industry undergoes one of its worse downturns in decades.
Combined, Shell and BG will overtake Chevron (CVX.N) as the world's second-biggest publicly-traded oil and gas company measured by market value.
The combined company is also set to topple Exxon as the largest publicly-traded oil and gas producer by 2020, according to analysts at Simmons and Company.
Once the two companies merge, Shell will start a complex integration process that will include thousands of job cuts, tens of billions of dollars in asset sales and the harmonizing of the companies' trading and production operations as they overlap in many parts of the world.
Shell has promised to find $3.5 billion from cost savings and overlaps by 2018, from various areas including its corporate, administrative and IT operations.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bg...-idUSKCN0V61VW (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bg-group-m-a-shell-idUSKCN0V61VW)
BG will now merge with Shell on Feb. 15, nearly two decades after the company was born from British Gas and just a few months after it reached record oil and gas output thanks to new projects in Australia and Brazil.
At a meeting in London, 99.53 percent of BG shareholders voted in favor of the merger, a day after 83 percent of Shell's shareholders approved the deal first announced on April 8 last year.
Shell shareholders are putting their faith in CEO Ben van Beurden's decision to focus the Anglo-Dutch company's operations in liquefied natural gas (LNG) and deep water oil production over the coming decades as the industry undergoes one of its worse downturns in decades.
Combined, Shell and BG will overtake Chevron (CVX.N) as the world's second-biggest publicly-traded oil and gas company measured by market value.
The combined company is also set to topple Exxon as the largest publicly-traded oil and gas producer by 2020, according to analysts at Simmons and Company.
Once the two companies merge, Shell will start a complex integration process that will include thousands of job cuts, tens of billions of dollars in asset sales and the harmonizing of the companies' trading and production operations as they overlap in many parts of the world.
Shell has promised to find $3.5 billion from cost savings and overlaps by 2018, from various areas including its corporate, administrative and IT operations.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bg...-idUSKCN0V61VW (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bg-group-m-a-shell-idUSKCN0V61VW)