MOSCOW (MRC) -- Billionaire Warren Buffett dumped ExxonMobil shares held by Berkshire Hathaway and took a USD4.5 billion stake in refiner Phillips 66 after souring on the outlook for oil prices, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to his television interview.
"I did get less enthusiastic about crude oil prices at the time we owned" Exxon, he said in an interview with Bloomberg television Tuesday. "I felt that the future wasn't going to be as good as people were thinking it was going to be."
That pessimistic view of oil was only part of the reason Berkshire exited Exxon, Buffett said, noting that he no longer owns any oil and gas production businesses.
His choice to invest in Phillips 66 stems from his admiration of Greg Garland, the refiner’s chairman and chief executive officer, as well as its operations in chemicals and other businesses, he told CNBC.
"We’re not buying it as a refiner," he said. "We’re certainly not buying it as an integrated oil company. We’re buying it because we like the company and we like the management very much."
Refiners have far outperformed other energy companies this year, rising 15% as the energy sector broadly has fallen about 20%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Berkshire initially owned a stake of Phillips 66 after it was spun out of ConocoPhillips in 2012, exiting most of the position after buying one of Phillips’s business units.
"I had always intended that we would come back in, assuming that the price was right. And we did," he said.
As MRC informed previously, in August 2015, ExxonMobil announced that it would add flexibility to process light crudes at its Beaumont refinery in Texas, increasing production capacity by approximately 20,000 bpd. This expansion will further strengthen ExxonMobil’s integrated downstream portfolio in Southeast Texas.
ExxonMobil is the largest non-government owned company in the energy industry and produces about 3% of the world's oil and about 2% of the world's energy.
MRC