Williams

Clarification: The new Williams lawyer, Sarah Miller, was not hired specifically to fend off the hostile takeover bid from ETE. Our original headline and lead sentence for this story may have left that impression (since updated). Ms. Miller, as we point out in the article, has worked for Williams for the past 15 years. Her appointment, according to a Williams official, was already in the works long before the ETE bid. However, we maintain that Ms. Miller will be very busy in the coming weeks and months because of the ETE bid.

Williams has a new top lawyer who will help defend the company in a hostile takeover bid from Kelcy Warren, CEO of Enterprise Transfer Equity. Yesterday MDN shared the news that Warren, after six months of unsuccessfully trying to woo Williams into a merger deal, has dropped that effort and begun a new effort–a hostile takeover of the company (see Energy Transfer Makes “Indecent Proposal” to Buy Williams for $48B). We don’t read much into the retirement of the previous top attorney at Williams–Craig Rainey. The press release says he retired. Since he was somewhere around 63 years old by our calculations, it’s not surprising Rainey retired. Replacing him is Sarah Miller who has worked for Williams for the past 15 years in various legal roles. Miller has been the “acting” top attorney at the company since March. Miller now has her hands full with an unwanted effort to take over the company…
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In the oil and gas industry, in both the upstream (drillers) and midstream (pipelines) sectors, companies often split themselves into several different companies on paper. It all has to do with taxes and getting as much money as possible to investors. High finance stuff. The trend lately, however, seems to be going in the reverse direction. Instead of creating subsidiaries on paper, midstream companies are recombining into one larger whole. It happened last November when the stockholders (or unit holders) for four Kinder Morgan companies voted to combine into one mothership company (see Shareholders Approve Kinder Morgan Plan to Merge 4 into 1). A couple of things were notable about that recombination: One thing is that Kinder Morgan is the largest midstream company in the U.S. The second thing is that its founder, Richard Kinder, is the man who pioneered the use of MLPs or Master Limited Partnerships as a way of bumping up profits for shareholders. He reversed himself and knit it all back together, on paper. What is perhaps the country’s second largest midstream company, Williams, is now doing the same thing. Yesterday Williams announced that it is buying out its subsidiary Williams Partners LP in a stock deal valued at $13.8 billion. That is, Williams is buying itself–or rather a piece of itself–and streamlining the corporate structure of the company…
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The midstream behemoth Williams issued an update for first quarter 2015 yesterday. Williams, like other large companies, is split into pieces. There is the mother ship Williams (stock ticker symbol WMB) and Williams Partners (stock ticker symbol WPZ). Since Williams Partners is the active company in the northeast, we’ll limit our focus to the report from that part of the company. Williams merged with (bought out) Access Midstream. Although that process was completed during 1Q15, the numbers reported for Williams Partners are “pre-merger” numbers, excluding the Access Midstream numbers. We expect that will change in 2Q15 when the two will have been joined throughout the entire quarter. The financials show that like drillers, Williams experienced an increase in revenue in 1Q15 compared with a year ago, but a decrease in profit, or net income. Revenue in 1Q15 was $917 million, up 19%. But net income in 1Q15 was $89 million, down a whopping 75%. Here’s the update from Williams Partners, with plenty of references to Access Midstream too…
Read More “Williams 1Q15: Revenue Up 19%, Net Income Down Big 75%”