It’s been a bumpy year for the BP (LSE: BP) share price, which has plunged 28.39% over the last 12 months.
The recent slide has wiped out its price gains from the 2022 energy shock. Over five years, BP shares are down 17.62%. The consolation is that long-term investors have received a load of dividends in that time, but it’s still disappointing.
The reason? Well it’s hardly surprising. The oil and gas explorer’s fortunes are tightly linked to fossil fuel prices, and they’ve been cooling lately, too. I didn’t expect that but like many things in life, the oil price is impossible to predict.
Can this FTSE 100 underperformer take off?
With Putin still slogging it out in Ukraine, it’s easy to imagine a world where energy prices are much higher. Especially if we throw in that other geopolitical wildcard, Middle East tensions.
Yet other factors have driven prices down, including falling demand from China, economic uncertainty in the US and Europe, and rising supply.
Oil producers are perennially torn between cutting supply to drive up the price, and increasing production to win market share from rivals. Saudi Arabia may be shifting from the former to the latter. That’s also a negative for the oil price. And for BP shares.
On the plus side, Brent crude is still above $70 a barrel, while BP can break even at around $40. There’s a lot of profit to be made in the gap between those two numbers.
BP’s not going to repeat 2023’s bumper year, when profits raced past $15bn and the board spent $7.9bn of surplus cash buying its own shares and cancelling them. Second-quarter 2024 profits of $2.76bn are still pretty good, though. Plus investors enjoyed another $3.5bn of share buybacks across the first half.
I’ve just been looking at analysts’ forecasts, and they’re impressively upbeat. The 26 analysts offering one-year price forecasts have set a median target for the BP share price of 516.1p. That’s almost 30% higher than today’s 399p.
I’m hoping for dividends and growth here
Throw in a forecast yield of 5.8% – nicely covered 2.1 times by earnings – and that would lift the total one-year return past 35%.
Having bought BP’s shares recently, I’d be more than happy with that. But there’s a wide range of price predictions out there. The maximum is a sky-high 653.4p while the minimum is just 429.65p. Either are credible.
I bought BP shares with the intention of holding them for a lot longer than a year, making broker estimates interesting but largely academic. The FTSE 100 oil giant looks good value to me, trading at 5.9 times trading earnings. A price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 0.4 means investors are essentially paying 40p for each £1 of sales the company makes.
Risks remain, particularly the long-term challenge of climate change, which the BP board appears to have ducked by doubling down on fossil fuels. At some point, that position may no longer be politically sustainable, but this will also spare BP some of the losses green pioneers are likely to suffer.
I’m confident BP shares will fly above 500p, I just can’t say when. In the meantime, I’ll keep reinvesting my dividends so I’ll own more stock when they do.
