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Strategies & Market Trends : Dividend investing for retirement -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bocor who wrote (10598)	12/17/2011 12:19:10 PM
From: JimisJim	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34328

Another driving force behind SDRL's move -- and indeed, many OSX companies are doing similar things, including my biggest client -- several years ago, Brazil warned the entire sector that the amount of business they will get there will to a significant extent depend on how much any OSX company is "Brazilian." A few weeks ago, I helped put together 4 massive proposals for PBR projects in Guará Norte, Cernambi Sul, Lula Central, and Lula Alto and one of the major "sections" of all 4 proposals was an in-depth breakdown of "Brazilian content" in the proposal, i.e., how much of the equipment would be built in Brazil by Brazilians and how much of the labor would be Brazilian. My client opened an office in Rio a few blocks from PBR's offices there two years ago and have been hiring Brazilian engineers, etc. expressly for this purpose as PBR represent a large hunk of the worldwide oilfield "work" going on now and for at least a couple of decades going forward. PBR contracted a lot of RIG platforms, but now there is a non-zero chance they will be kicked out of Brazilian waters and I'm sure that SDRL wants to be in a position to not only take RIG's place, but to go one step further and claim they are more "Brazilian" than RIG ever was. The fact is, however, if Brazil wants to develop those fields any time soon, they will need RIG. Remember, these Brazilian fields may be the trickiest fields ever developed in the history of the world. However, Brazil (which owns roughly half of PBR) will slap RIG's wrists somehow and that may include no new RIG contracts and/or ending a handful as a token punishment -- there just aren't enough of the sort of high-spec rigs in existence (for now) in the world for Brazil to boycott RIG altogether, but SDRL is positioning themselves to be first in line for any new rig/platform contracts. Just thought I'd flesh out some of the background wrt Brazil and the politics of OSX there. Jim