
Halliburton buys oilfield rival Baker Hughes for $34B - oulipian
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/halliburton-buys-oilfield-rival-baker-hughes-for-34b-1.2837391
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csirac2
My first job out of uni was for an oilfield services company around 2006-2008.
I did another 12 months for them recently in 2013. It's an outrageously
homogenized industry at almost every level, at least here in Australia: it
seems that in earlier times, it wasn't so hard to make your small own oilfield
startup. But nowadays oilfield-specific instrumentation vendors (and sensor
manufacturers!) have largely been bought out and either shut-down or brought
in-house by the bigger players.

A diverse set of contractors means you're all double-checking each other's
work. I've also seen jobs where most of the services are provided turn-key
from one main contractor (and we'd been brought in reluctantly due to
availability problems). When everything from the rig, to the drilling fluids,
bits, sat comms, wireline services, DST/production and so on are all provided
by the one umbrella company there's a lot more copy-pasta going on and
opportunity for errors to propagate [and never get noticed]...

It's a shame, Baker Hughes seems like it had a pretty phenomenal history.

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jusben1369
You could be talking about so many industries of course. It seems as though
economies of scale outweighs some of the issues you raise as the majority of
major industries make this change over time.

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Shivetya
Welcome to the land over regulation. Regulation in the public view is about
protection of people and things where in the business world it really means,
protected vested interest - as in established businesses who do not want
competition. By making regulations onerous enough only the big can comply you
pretty much stop the little guy from even trying

There are startups discussed here daily that run up against the regulatory
wall, some make out okay, others no so well

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pm90
How is it that they are not being targeted by US antitrust laws? I'm no expert
in oil services business, but as far as I recall, Schlumberger is the only
competitor left.

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joe_momma
Halliburton moved its headquarters to Dubai I think. Are they even a U.S.
entity anymore?

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jarek
Halliburton is still incorporated in the U.S., and Baker Hughes is
headquartered in Houston so the merger will fall under purview of U.S.
antitrust anyway

"The merger is widely expected to raise anti-trust concerns"
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/17/us-bakerhughes-
off...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/17/us-bakerhughes-offer-
idUSKCN0J116520141117)

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sharpercoder
I have _just_ signed an (employee) contract to work for Bake Hughes in The
Netherlands. Are there any implications I should think about? I am still in a
position to pull back, as I have not yet ended my current contract.

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csirac2
Are you in oilfield service delivery or Baker's product development/support
side? If the former, your skills will be trivially transportable to
Halliburton and the industry generally. If the latter, Baker still have a lot
of cool stuff that I imagine Halliburton would keep running for quite a few
years yet - just look at all the other acquisitions made in the industry, Eg.
when Schlumberger bought Pathfinder, they have kept the Pathfinder business
running for years even though it directly competed with their own (admittedly
they seemed to pivot Pathfinder at the budget end of things, at least in
Australia - but still).

