Spotlight falls on Cenovus debt reduction, rail contract talks

By Laharee Chatterjee and Nivedita Bhattacharjee

(Reuters) - Canadian oil sands company Cenovus Energy investors will scrutinize quarterly earnings this week for details on Chief Executive Alex Pourbaix's debt-cutting efforts and crude-for-rail contract negotiations to help resolve pipeline jams.

After last year's unpopular acquisition of ConocoPhillips' assets, Pourbaix, who inherited a company last October with C$9.51 billion in long-term debt, is giving himself until 2019 to turn Cenovus around and bring that figure down.

He also took charge of a company with low staff morale and rising investor angst. He told Reuters in May his target is to reduce Cenovus' balance sheet to two times EBITDA. Cenovus' leverage was 2.8 times as of Dec. 31, 2017, according to its latest filing.

"Once the deleveraging is complete, we will consider balancing returning cash to shareholders with investing in growth projects," he said.

Douglas Kee, chief investment officer at Leon Frazer & Associates, said Cenovus is not expected to increase dividends until later in 2019. He sees a rise of 10 to 15 percent at best. In the first quarter, Cenovus declared a dividend of 5 cents per share representing an annualized yield of about 2 percent.

Investors wiped out about a fifth of the Calgary-based company's market value when it bought ConocoPhillips' oil sands assets for C$17 billion last year. Shares are now up about 51.4 percent after plunging to a record low in February.

Analysts on average expect Cenovus to report a second-quarter profit of 3 Canadian cents on revenue of C$5.28 billion on Thursday, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. It reported revenue of C$4.04 billion and earnings of C$2.37 cents per share in the year-ago period.

But its turnaround plans have been complicated by pipeline bottlenecks that are choking oil flow from Canada. A supply crunch of heavy oil from Venezuela has increased demand for Canadian oil sands, but Pourbaix told Reuters that opportunity has been challenged by the pipeline crunch.

Transport bottlenecks, the result of pipelines running at full capacity, have deepened the discount for Canadian oil over U.S. light crude and Cenovus' differentials per barrel jumped 67 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier.

Pourbaix, who has been negotiating with rail companies about increasing locomotive hauling capacity for oil, said for rail to be competitive costs have to be closer to $10 or $12 a barrel than around $20 currently to get to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

He said in May that he expects significant volumes of oil to move via rail out of Alberta over the third and fourth quarters and into the new year, but he declined to give a number.

Canadian National Railway Co expects to move more crude shipments by rail in the back half of 2018, Chief Executive Jean-Jacques Ruest said on Tuesday.

Pourbaix has also trimmed the company's middle and upper management and initiated changes to improve employee morale, including "coffee chats" with employees.

The changes seem to have softened investors and two headhunters in Canada said there were fewer Cenovus employees looking for job changes.

"His message that capital allocation is more important and he is cutting costs, cutting jobs, willing to sell more assets I think that has certainly helped," Laura Lau, portfolio manager at Brompton Group said.

(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Laharee Chatterjee in Bengaluru; editing by Susan Thomas and Tom Brown)