Dividend in focus as BP investors look to oil giant’s results

What will Bernard Looney do to BPs dividend?

The directors at the oil giant are bound to have discussed what to do with the payout – fully aware that if they keep it up for the rest of the year BP will be the most generous company in the FTSE 100.

It is an attractive crown to wear for any company but the pressures to slash the dividend will also be weighing heavily on the board.

BP not only kept, but slightly raised, its dividend three months ago when it presented first quarter results, flying in the face of some of its closest rivals.

However, facing the Covid crisis, and needing money for his plans to supposedly turn BP into a ‘net zero’ company, chief executive Mr Looney might want to slash the payout for the first time in a decade.

The results for the second quarter are “going to be ugly” whatever happens, said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould.

Analysts are expecting underlying replacement costs to hit a £5.2bn loss in the quarter, from a £2.1bn profit in the same period last year. This is according to a consensus compiled by BP.

The average price of Brent crude oil hit 29.50 dollars a barrel over the quarter, down from 69 dollars this time last year.

BP slashed the value of its oil and gas reserves by £13.3bn in June due to the lower oil prices.

Mr Mould said that the sale of BP’s petrochemicals unit to Ineos for £3.8bn will unlock some cash that could be funnelled into the dividend.

It will “help a lot”, Mr Mould said, but “we may still be at the stage where an unchanged dividend would be a bigger surprise than a cut”.

“If BP sticks to that for the whole year it would be the single biggest dividend payer in the FTSE 100, at around £6.7bn,” he added.

Ahead of the results, investors might take some heart from Shell’s recent report. Shell’s results showed a big loss in the second quarter, but when taking out the effects of a massive impairment caused by Covid-19, it managed to turn a profit where analysts were expecting a loss.

It was an echo of the first quarter when BP made a statutory loss but managed to turn a profit when stripping out the effects of write-downs.