Oil services provider Halliburton Co and Baker Hughes Inc will sell additional businesses in connection with Halliburton’s pending acquisition of its smaller rival, the companies said in a joint statement.
When the companies announced the deal, Halliburton said it foresaw up to $7.5 billion in assets may have to be sold to win approval, but that it did not expect regulators to demand such large divestitures.
For Baker Hughes, the merger will give the company an enterprise value of about $38 billion. The overall stock market and oil prices also were down Monday morning.
Baker on Monday said it now plans to divest its core completions business, which includes packers, flow control tools, subsurface safety systems, intelligent well systems, permanent monitoring, sand control tools and sand control screens. Baker Hughes Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Martin Craighead said the merger would be “efficient”.
These businesses coupled with the other previously announced divestitures – Halliburton’s fixed cuter and roller cone drill bits, directional drilling and logging-while-drilling/measurement-while-drilling businesses – brought in a combined revenue of $5.2 billion in 2013, the year before the merger was announced.
Additional properties targeted for sale include assets in Halliburton’s well completion and production business, two Baker Hughes pressure pumping vessels in the Gulf of Mexico and its offshore cementing business in Australia, Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico, Norway and Britain.
The assets announced Monday are generally “down the fairway” for investor expectations and still “don’t cut into the muscle” for the deal’s ultimate value, Lemoine said. The additional businesses up for sale are the “necessary blocking/tackling” for getting the deal done, they wrote.
Whether the proposed divestitures pass muster with all of the regulatory agencies involved hasn’t been determined. The target is either December 15, or 30 days after both certify compliance with U.S. Justice Department requests, whichever is later.
