Bernstein upgrades BP; highlights ability to weather oil price storm

Bernstein upgraded oil giant BP to ‘outperform’ from ‘market perform’ and kept the price target unchanged at 450p.

It said that given recent relative share price performance, it sees attractive upside of more than 30%.

It noted that BP has underperformed the European oil and gas sector by 5% and the European market and major peers by 10% in the third quarter so far, which seems extreme.

“Our recent analysis of BP's ability to weather really tough oil price storms e.g. 1987-1997 highlighted their resilience and will prove valuable in the current storm many investors expect,” said Bernstein.

In its research series examining how oil majors adapted to periods of low oil prices, Bernstein was struck by BP's success in lowering costs, maintaining organic investment, and paying dividends with less Upstream volume growth than peers.

Bernstein said the company’s Upstream portfolio length and depth still needs bolstering and it would welcome acquisitions at this point in the cycle. However, it argued that new projects in Russia and Oman may not be fully appreciated by the market.

“While the equity market will never give full credit to value created in the Russian Upstream, BP do deliver there. Recent moves into new developments and exploration with Rosneft are highly value accretive on our estimates,” it said.

At 1052 BST, BP shares were down 0.7% at 340.20p.