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Oil & Gas in the Americas

Where should this valves manufacturer go?

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This European oil & gas services company seeks to expand its reach in Canada, USA, Mexico and the rest of Latin America and the Carribean; how should it do so?

Generic Plc (not real name) supplies industrial valve safety products to the oil and gas industry. They are headquartered in Europe and now intend to make greater inroads in the Americas market. Where should they start? 

 

All information used in the compilation of this report is freely available in the public domain. While sufficient at this stage, it may not be as specialized or specific as would be possible with subscription based trade industry furnished data. Nevertheless, I believe the available public information is enough to at the least provide a picture of the Americas market that Generic intends to actively engage and suggest where it should select for starting blocks.

 

I should reiterate that the analyses and inferences contained here are entirely mine; the data has been mined, transformed, analyzed and interpreted from its raw form, and decisions as to how to compile, allocate, analyze and deduce are mine. As such, if there are errors within them, these would be ascribable to me as well. Nonetheless, I believe the analyses have been thorough and my assumptions (as will be detailed below) quite reasonable. Generic internal company strategy might expectedly override some conclusions reached here, but I doubt that they would negate them. 

 

Method

 

The document should have been in two parts, with the first part focused on the Americas markets and the second on who Generic’s competitors are likely to be. Information about competitors was difficult to find and so the document deals just with the markets; that is, the two continents of North America and Central & South America. Generic' specific industry segment is “industrial valve safety solutions”, which comprises valve interlocks, valve position indicators, partial stroke testing devices and portable valve actuators. Generic is essentially a services company, though, meaning that in industry classification groupings it would come under “Services - Security and Protection Services”, rather than “Industrial Goods - Industrial Equipment & Components”. This specificity will help decide how to evaluate the market that Generic intends to be active in: what is its nature, size, growth pattern, etc. and how should it be quantified.

 

That done, the next market question to be answered is: which Americas countries should Generic engage first?

 

The instinctive response to that might be: the largest markets (production capacity) first. But I suggest that it is important to not go purely by market size but also by additional considerations which capture the markets’ levels of activity as well. And so, I have carried out analytical comparisons of the dozens of countries that comprise the Americas and eventually ranked them according to a Performance Index that is a composite of the countries’ scores across some select performance parameters. As a proxy for market (in the absence of more specific industry/trade data) I have used the oil and gas sectors in each country, which are the sectors to which Generic' client base belongs. And so, I have employed as criteria: domestic production of crude oil, domestic production of natural gas, and domestic refining of petroleum products, all of these across the past 10 years, which I consider to be an appropriate time frame, not too short and not too drawn out.

Method
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Rankings

In addition, rather than just those “static” indicators (size of output), the parameters should also be able to evaluate the levels of activity in the three sectors; that is, attempting to answer the query: is this a declining industry in country A, even though the country may be a large producer? It would be desirable to focus on countries with vibrant oil and gas sectors that offer growth in the coming years and not stagnation or decline. And so, growth indicators are also introduced into the mix: year-on-year growth rates in activities of the energy sectors mentioned above.

 

Eventually, the Americas’ countries performance according to 6 parameters are evaluated and expressed in the final Performance Index, which is a composite of the 6:

 

  • Production of crude oil, NGPL and other liquids (barrels per day)

  • Production of natural gas (billion cubic feet)

  • Refinery production of petroleum products (barrels per day)

  • Annual growth in production of crude oil, NGPL and other liquids

  • Annual growth in production of natural gas

  • Annual growth in production of refined petroleum products

 

For the production indices (the first three parameters), average volume across the latest 3 years is used, and for the growth indices (next three parameters), average annual growth across the latest 5 years; these should provide a more stable and therefore realistic picture.

 

Of the 51 countries and territories that comprise the Americas (they are listed in the Appendix), 14 were considered of significance in oil and gas, going by volumes of production (for example, at least 50,000 bpd crude oil production). These were then evaluated according to their performance as explained, and the top 8 ranking were selected as critical markets for Generic. The comparative analytical process scored the countries according to how much they out-performed their counterparts in the production and growth parameters. The resulting top 8 markets (out of the 14) are shown in the tables below, with their performance scores. ∎

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Oil activity
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Gas activity
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Refinery activity
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EIA world countries and territories
© Tony Okoromadu   This site is an aggregation of some of my work, and they are - as such - protected under extant copyright law.
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