Photo by Robin MayIt just keeps getting worse for Halliburton — that’s the opening line in a Houston Press story published Tuesday.
On Monday the dual headquartered — Dubai and Houston — oilfield services company, second largest to Schlumberger in the U.S., announced that it had cut another 4,000 workers while losing money on drilling and related services in the fourth quarter of 2015. The company, which last year employed about 1,000 in the Acadiana region, does not give a breakdown of where the cuts are taking place, but the company has been slashing jobs locally.
Industry experts say more downsizing is expected for Halliburton and its closest competitors, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes, which continue to work through a variety of antitrust issues over their proposed merger. The merger was first announced in November 2014.
Notes the Houston Press:
At this point, this means Halliburton has laid off about 22,000 workers. That constitutes roughly 25 percent of the company’s global workforce, as Halliburton has grappled with the worst oil bust we’ve seen since the 1980s. More troubling, it looks as if the situation won’t be turning around anytime soon, since crude oil is hovering around $30 per barrel and will probably continue hanging around those bargain-basement prices as we roll through 2016.
That’s certainly what the heads of Halliburton are expecting, a fair guess based on what they experienced in 2015. In North America, which is Halliburton’s largest region, sales skidded to 54 percent lower in the fourth quarter compared with that period the year prior, dropping to $2.16 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Customers here and in Canada have continued to cut back on their drilling activity while also asking Halliburton to give them lower prices, another reason sales tanked in 2015, according to the company’s quarterly report.
Read the story here.