Brazil’s Petrobras plans to extract every last drop of oil from existing oil fields, Bloomberg has reported, while also searching for fresh deposits to avoid a decline in output in the next decade.

As part of these plans, Petrobras will seek to revitalize production from aging fields, such as those in the Campos Basin, where recovery rates have declined to just 17% and this “bothers” the company’s management, according to chief executive Magda Chambriard.

The guiding principle for the company would be “all the oil counts”, with the detailed plan for its future production to be made public next month.

The news comes on the heels of a report that Petrobras would spend less capital next year, cutting its capex plan to $17 billion from an earlier target of $21 billion to make it more realistic. The five-year capex plan for 2024-2028, however, remains at 31% higher than the previous five-year period.

Meanwhile, efforts to increase oil and gas production are bearing fruit. Petrobras produced 2.7 million barrels of oil equivalent in the second quarter of the year, which represented a 2.4% increase as the company ramped up production at five platforms and started 12 new wells, of which eight in the Campos Basin and four in the Santos Basin.

The ramp-up follows a 25% drop in Brazilian output earlier this year amid platform maintenance. Now, platforms are returning from maintenance and producing more oil. Earlier-than-expected starts to some projects are also set to help Brazil recover its oil output later this year, and production could exceed forecasts.

For next year, the International Energy Agency has forecast that Brazilian oil production would go up by 190,000 barrels daily. With Petrobras accounting for as much as 90% of that total, that increase will fall to its platforms. Yet the company is adding production capacity of a lot more than 190,000 bpd right now: by the end of the year it would add three new floating production and storage vessels with a combined production capacity of over 500,000 barrels daily.

Source: OILPRICE

Source: Burhan Khadbai 

A Harris administration would likely be “status quo”

A Trump administration could take aim at certain pieces of the legislation

Stimulating U.S. manufacturing and increasing competitiveness with China are two areas have significant bipartisan support

The IRA has yielded beneficiaries across party lines

As such, the IRA seems unlikely to be significantly dismantled and even if some policies were diminished, the secular inertia behind the U.S. energy transition will continue. The renewable share of U.S. final energy consumption is still just 8%, and while that’s grown from 4% in 2010, the journey has just begun. Still, investors should take heed to the evolving winners and losers that can arise as policy incentives potentially change, hyperscaler demand mounts and grid inefficiencies seek new solutions.

The once-booming tech sector in Singapore has been hit hard by lay-offs in recent months, with some of the biggest names in the business axing jobs left, right and centre.

Earlier in October, consumer electronics giants Dyson and Samsung laid off an undisclosed number of workers in Singapore on the same day.

In July, fintech company MoneyHero laid off 80 staff as a cost-cutting measure. In the same month, logistics technology company Ninja Van sacked 5 per cent of its workforce in Singapore, before suspending operations of a subsidiary firm in Vietnam as it seeks to resolve issues over owed salaries and employee social insurance contributions.

The Straits Times explains why the lay-offs happened and what tech workers can do about it.

Why are more tech lay-offs happening?

Restructuring, rising employment cost and slow growth forecast are among factors leading to job cuts.

UOB senior economist Alvin Liew said the “earlier rounds of retrenchments” may have been caused by a combination of economic uncertainty, rising interest rates and cases of overhiring during the pandemic.

“But the underlying factors most likely have evolved due to the rise of the application of artificial intelligence (AI),” he noted, adding that the retrenchments have not been limited to Singapore and have been taking place in key global tech centres since 2022.

Mr Faiz Modak, associate director for tech and transformation at recruitment firm Robert Walters Singapore, said that while many firms “hired aggressively” after the Covid-19 recovery phase, the global market witnessed a slowdown in 2023.

Companies want to focus on profitability and productivity, so they are “consolidating their workforce with a right-sizing approach”, he added.

What is happening to the tech landscape?

The landscape has changed, said CGS International economic adviser Song Seng Wun.

“Companies answerable to their board members... have to become a bit more ruthless in managing their costs, especially since the cost of money is no longer as free as it used to be.”

He was referring to the impact of inflation and climbing interest rates on companies, which used to borrow money at almost close to zero interest. In short, it is more expensive to borrow money now.

Additionally, he noted a very competitive landscape where brands are “catching up on quality” and are able to sell their products at cheaper prices.

What type of tech roles will bear the biggest impact?

Source: Straitstimes

Australian dollar debt sales, running at the fastest clip on record, are starting to hit the brakes as capital markets hunker down for the U.S. election, according to bankers in Sydney.

Some A$267.6 billion ($180.4 billion) has been raised in the debt market over the year to Oct. 8, the largest figure on Dealogic records stretching back to 1995, as pandemic-era borrowing has been refinanced into hot investor demand.

Financial institutions have sold A$95.6 billion in debt - a record for the year-to-date, as is the A$61.4 billion in asset or mortgage-backed debt. Total corporate issuance, at A$26.4 billion, is up nearly 70% on the previous year.

Yet bankers said the rush to do deals - encouraged by benign market conditions and an expectation that the U.S. election could make this quarter unpredictable - has abruptly slowed.

The pause, albeit in a small corner of the world's debt market, points to an imminent broader drawdown in global capital market activity in the lead up to an unusually close U.S. vote.

"If we look forward, I think the volatility is kicking up, we're going into the U.S. election, so that's my big caveat," said Simon Ward, head of debt capital markets for Australasia at Mizuho Securities Asia in Sydney.

"The conditions were excellent...every market, the major markets anyway, have been on fire," he said.

"In the domestic Aussie dollar market for corporates, it's a record by every metric. But a factor in that has been getting ahead of the back end of this year, and I'm sitting at the desk today and literally catching up on more of the administrative daily tasks - it's a bit of a gap and a bit of a breather."

On the demand side LSEG data showed Australian bond funds drawing in $4.8 billion for the first three quarters of the year, the biggest such rush in fourteen years.

Performance has been solid, too, and at the investment grade end of the market, the ICE BofA index of AAA Australian corporate debt is up 3.8% this year against a 2.2% rise for the U.S. AAA corporate index.

SELLERS MARKET

Australia's big four banks dominate the market and most other corporate issuers are domestic, though the buoyant conditions have attracted global banks from the U.S. and Europe and corporations including Nestle and BP .

New sellers such as Registry Finance, the issuing entity for the operator of Queensland's land titles registry, also debuted at long maturities of 7.5 years and 10-years , which trade at yields above 5%.

"It's definitely felt like a seller's market this year rather than a buyer's market," said Amy Xie Patrick, head of income strategies at fund manager Pendal in Sydney, who nevertheless has seen inflows into her funds.

"I do think that a lot of the attraction of our credit markets this year has been to offshore Asian investors who are especially yield hungry. And you've seen high levels of demand for those kinds of bonds come through," she said, referring to tier 2 bank debts.

To be sure, Australian dollar debt remains a relatively small slice of the $7.2 trillion that Dealogic says was raised in global debt capital markets so far this year. But it can be a bellwether for global trends and a slower fourth quarter looms.

"What we have seen this year is certainly a bringing forward of plans," said Nick Kalisperis, head of debt capital markets syndicate for Australasia at UBS in Sydney. "In that sense a lot of what needed to be done has already been done."

Source: The edge markets