Head of Investor Relations
BP
Fergus MacLeod, head of investor relations at BP, is an outsider who has inside knowledge of what matters most to the London-based global energy giant’s shareholders. The 49-year-old Scotsman, who joined BP in 2002, is a former oil and global energy analyst for NatWest Securities and Deutsche Bank.
“You can provide a lot of insight for the management by providing the perspective of an external analyst, but with the level of information that is available to you internally,” he says.
BP, which ties for first place with BG Group in having Europe’s Best Investor Relations in Oil & Gas, according to sell-side equity analysts, began breaking out detailed information on its debt position and capital generation in the fourth quarter of 2007. MacLeod figured that as credit became tight, investors and analysts would want to know about how the financial crisis was affecting BP’s balance sheet.
“In 2007 very little would have been written in a research report about BP’s debt level or debt maturities,” says Stephen (Paul) Spedding, an oil analyst with HSBC Bank in London. “But when the credit crisis arrived, suddenly that became a much larger part of any given research report. BP’s investor relations team was able to give full disclosure of debt profiles, debt ratings and ratios. They were very early and very proactive in talking to equity analysts about that.”
The company also started disclosing information about the profitability of its major subsidiaries. “There was quite a struggle internally over this because some people fear we are giving information to the competition,” MacLeod says. BP’s share price tumbled 14.5 percent last year but still outperformed the sector by 8.8 percentage points; the stock slid a further 10.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.
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