Financial and operational efficiencies of national and international oil companies: An empirical investigation

Abstract

The last two decades have seen a shift in market interest in favor of national oil companies (NOCs) to replace the dominance of international oil companies (IOCs). Since approximately 90% of the oil reserves and 75% of oil production is under the control of NOCs, it is imperative to analyze and understand their performance and efficiency in comparison to the successful business and governance model of IOCs in order to have enhanced forecasts in highly fluctuating market conditions. In the past, some studies attempted to understand the influence of different ownership models, i.e., public or private, but these studies are constrained by their assumptions and limitations. Moreover, the previous studies fail to reach a consensus with regards to the effectiveness of a given ownership model in comparison to the other. The present work is an effort to fill this gap by estimating the operational and financial efficiency differentials of NOCs and IOCs. A comprehensive literature review is carried out as a first step, which helped in identifying the relevant performance measures and the statistical methods that should be employed to obtain conclusive results. Overall, 10 indicators (3 financial and 7 operational) are used in this study to perform four analyses: (i) financial analysis; (ii) operational analysis; (iii) Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA); and (iv) Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The sample consists of 50 firms (composed of 16 NOCs and 34 IOCs), and our temporal interest is in fifteen years (2002–2016). The results suggest that, in general, IOCs perform better than NOCs but the role of privatization on the performance and efficiency of NOCs remains contentious since some NOCs perform as good as the best IOCs. Nevertheless, on average, it is safe to imply that privatization may lead to improved performance and efficiency since shareholder-owned firms, generally, perform better than the national players. For that matter, even some partially privatized firms show evidence of better performance in comparison to NOCs. However, since NOCs are mandated to fulfil the non-commercial objectives of the state as well, in addition to commercial obligations, it would be interesting to establish the comparison between NOCs and IOCs based on commercial and non-commercial performance.