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By Marcelo Gauto – Industrial Chemist
[supsystic-social-sharing id=’1′]You, like me, have probably heard that Petrobras is a “jobs dispenser”, that it is much less efficient than other oil companies in the world, and that there are a lot of people working there, among other similar comments. But is that really true? I was curious and sought some numbers to validate or not the issue. I evaluated the nine largest oil companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the results of the analysis are described below.
The first survey conducted was precisely to find out how many employees these nine oil companies have. I consulted annual balance sheets and information from the respective companies’ websites, with which I built the ranking expressed in Table 1. The numbers represent only the company’s own employees and do not include the so-called “outsourced” workers, as I could not find public data regarding how many third parties work for these companies.
Table 1 – Number of Employees of the Nine Largest Oil Companies Listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
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Table 1 shows that regarding the number of own employees, the Brazilian state-owned company is smaller than Shell, Total, BP, and Exxon, occupying the fifth position. These numbers alone do not mean much, so I will compare them with two important indicators: oil and gas production and the EBITDA of each company.
Oil and gas production is a very important number for oil companies, as a large part of their revenue comes from the sale of these commodities. Dividing oil and gas production by the number of employees, I obtained a new ranking presented in Table 2.
Table 2 – Oil and Gas Production per Employee of the Companies in Question
Table 2 already brings interesting perceptions: the Norwegian Statoil, despite not having the highest production in absolute values among the listed companies, has the highest oil and gas production per employee. In comparison, the Brazilian state-owned company is ahead of giants like Shell and Total, for example, and also ahead of Repsol. So, are Petrobras, Shell, Repsol, and Total “jobs dispensers” then?
Finally, I made a comparison of the number of employees with the EBITDA of each company (EBITDA reflects the profit obtained before deducting interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), presented in Table 3. I did not use net profit as a reference since it is a result strongly influenced by accounting operations, which often do not reflect the true cash generation potential of the companies.
Table 3 – EBITDA per Employee of the Companies in Question
In light of the above, it makes no sense to say that Petrobras is “a jobs dispenser”, since its operational results are in line with the largest oil companies in the world, even outperforming some giants like Shell when it comes to the number of production and profitability per number of employees.
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