Liam Denning, Columnist

Who's More Unpopular Than Frackers? The Guys Helping Them

Producers’ problems make their contractors’ lives even more miserable.

June 25, 2019 at 3:41 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Oilfield services companies swim in the sea of spending by frackers, and that is drying up.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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Oil and gas producer stocks are deeply unpopular. Oilfield services stocks, on the other hand, are deeply, deeply unpopular:

The oily water in which the services companies swim is the money that exploration and production firms spend – and it has dried up. Analysts at Morgan Stanley have just reduced their forecasts for upstream capital expenditure. In the title of the report, “Global Upstream Capex: Growth Still in the Cards,” that “Still” does most of the work.