XOM & RDS top Global 500

[Tree]

#1 profits and #4 in revenue - XOM made $44.9 billion in 2012 sales $449 billion.

#1 revenues and #6 in profits - RDS made $26.6 billion on sales of $481.7 billion.

Kinda flattering that 1 tried to steal IOC leases and the other bid highest because they could.

We got mama's good looks and soon daddy's money.

[Tree]

Tilson's comments today in Gator's post, it is kinda scary that IOC's management can always out clever everyone except Tilson:


"I believe InterOil is one of the largest promotions of all time – but unfortunately (so far) for anyone short the stock, it’s also one of the cleverest. The company, which has all sorts of associations with questionable characters (and pretty much every other red flag a short seller looks for), has been drilling for natural gas in Papua New Guinea for well over a decade and has repeatedly claimed to have found the mother lode – only to disappoint investors again and again (see Appendix B for a remarkable and telling series of unfulfilled promises from the company and its founding CEO, Phil Mulacek, dating back to 2007). One would think investors would finally wise up, but to date they haven’t, as the company currently sports a $3.4 billion market cap.
This valuation is based on the expectation that InterOil has discovered one of the world’s largest natural gas fields and that current negotiations with ExxonMobil will result in an extremely lucrative deal for InterOil. I think the odds of this are close to zero.
To be clear, nobody – not InterOil’s management nor any outsider – knows with certainty whether the company has a real resource discovery or not. This isn’t a fraud like Bre-X (for those of you with long memories) because there really is some gas in InterOil’s fields, which makes it almost impossible to disprove the company’s claims. Instead, one has to analyze geological reports, look at the track record of the company’s promises, examine the background of the key people, and then apply common sense.
Here are the key facts: after 15 years of drilling, InterOil still has no proven, probable or possible reserves (nothing but a “contingent resource estimate” by a company well paid by InterOil); its founding CEO unexpectedly quit recently (when was the last time this event was followed by great news?); the company continues to burn enormous amounts of cash; and after hyping a bidding war among multiple major oil companies, is currently only negotiating with one, ExxonMobil (think about who’s likely to have the upper hand in those negotiations…)."