Halliburton buys oilfield rival Baker Hughes for $34B | Hacker News Reader

Halliburton buys oilfield rival Baker Hughes for $34B

cbc.ca

45 pointsoulipian10 comments

My first job out of uni was for an oilfield services company around 2006-2008. I did another 12 months for them recently in 2013. It's an outrageously homogenized industry at almost every level, at least here in Australia: it seems that in earlier times, it wasn't so hard to make your small own oilfield startup. But nowadays oilfield-specific instrumentation vendors (and sensor manufacturers!) have largely been bought out and either shut-down or brought in-house by the bigger players.

A diverse set of contractors means you're all double-checking each other's work. I've also seen jobs where most of the services are provided turn-key from one main contractor (and we'd been brought in reluctantly due to availability problems). When everything from the rig, to the drilling fluids, bits, sat comms, wireline services, DST/production and so on are all provided by the one umbrella company there's a lot more copy-pasta going on and opportunity for errors to propagate [and never get noticed]...

It's a shame, Baker Hughes seems like it had a pretty phenomenal history.

You could be talking about so many industries of course. It seems as though economies of scale outweighs some of the issues you raise as the majority of major industries make this change over time.

Welcome to the land over regulation. Regulation in the public view is about protection of people and things where in the business world it really means, protected vested interest - as in established businesses who do not want competition. By making regulations onerous enough only the big can comply you pretty much stop the little guy from even trying

There are startups discussed here daily that run up against the regulatory wall, some make out okay, others no so well

How is it that they are not being targeted by US antitrust laws? I'm no expert in oil services business, but as far as I recall, Schlumberger is the only competitor left.

Halliburton moved its headquarters to Dubai I think. Are they even a U.S. entity anymore?

Halliburton is still incorporated in the U.S., and Baker Hughes is headquartered in Houston so the merger will fall under purview of U.S. antitrust anyway

"The merger is widely expected to raise anti-trust concerns" http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/17/us-bakerhughes-off...

The US DOJ can still target, basically, any merger with global significance - especially if said companies do any business in the US.

You see the same thing when large American companies merge, they often have to get approval from the EU and increasingly Asian anti-trust authorities.

Halliburton has anticipated the anti-trust issues far in advance. They prepared segments of business they're willing to sell off and had it ready to go at announcement time, to make anti-trust regulators happy (Halliburton estimates they'd sell off about $7 billion in sales).

I have just signed an (employee) contract to work for Bake Hughes in The Netherlands. Are there any implications I should think about? I am still in a position to pull back, as I have not yet ended my current contract.

Are you in oilfield service delivery or Baker's product development/support side? If the former, your skills will be trivially transportable to Halliburton and the industry generally. If the latter, Baker still have a lot of cool stuff that I imagine Halliburton would keep running for quite a few years yet - just look at all the other acquisitions made in the industry, Eg. when Schlumberger bought Pathfinder, they have kept the Pathfinder business running for years even though it directly competed with their own (admittedly they seemed to pivot Pathfinder at the budget end of things, at least in Australia - but still).

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