An Australian oil and gas producer will exit the UK market in the latest blow to London as a global commodities centre.
Woodside Energy said that it would delist its shares from the London Stock Exchange on November 20 and retain its primary listing in Australia, where it is headquartered.
The Perth-based company said that trading in the London shares, which accounted for just 1 per cent of the company’s share capital, was low and that cancelling the shares would reduce administration costs.
The Macedon gas field is situated within a production licence on the North West Shelf, off Western Australia
WOODSIDE ENERGY
Woodside is the largest energy company listed in Australia and also has a standard listing in London. It reported net profits of $3.3 billion last year and operates the North West Shelf facility, Australia’s biggest liquefied natural gas project.
The move comes after BHP scrapped its dual Anglo-Australian listing in favour of a main listing in Sydney in 2022, which saw the FTSE 100 lose one of its largest constituents.
Palliser Capital, a London-based activist investor, has also applied pressure to Rio Tinto to abandon its primary listing in London and relocate to Australia, arguing that the FTSE 100 miner is prevented from pursuing corporate mergers and the listing had caused it to trade at a discount.
Woodside was focused on Australian oil and gas but it expanded significantly last year when it completed a merger with the oil and gas assets spun out of BHP, the mining group, including fields in the Gulf of Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago.
Tribeca, a Sydney-based hedge fund, called for Glencore to switch its primary listing from London to Sydney earlier this year, a move that could close the valuation gap between the commodities trading giant and international peers, it suggested.
At the end of last year it emerged that the group was in talks with Santos, of Adelaide, over a potential $52 billion merger, which would have created one of the world’s leading producers of liquefied natural gas. The companies confirmed in February that negotiations had been abandoned.
In its third quarter update, Woodside raised its full-year production guidance to 189 million to 195 million barrels of oil equivalent a day (boepd), an improvement from the 185 million and 195 million barrels previously outlined. It produced 53.1 million boepd during the September quarter, an 11 per cent increase on a year earlier, at an average realised price of $65 a barrel, up from $60 a barrel.
The London-listed shares were trading up by 44p, or 3.2 per cent, at £12.90 in afternoon trading.
