Chesapeake Energy (CHK - $19.57)
Chesapeake Energy is one of the largest oil and natural gas producers in the United States. The company has a storied history. Since its founding in 1989, it grew rapidly by acquiring acreage positions across North America’s largest resource plays. In our view, this growth left the company flush with high-quality assets, but financially overextended and operationally inefficient. During the past two years, the board of directors and the executive management team were replaced with new, shareholder-oriented leaders. This team began overhauling Chesapeake quickly by reducing leverage, simplifying the company’s financial structure and refocusing capital allocation on the highest return uses. In the past 18 months, Chesapeake has managed to spin off its non-core oilfield services business, sell billions of dollars of assets to reduce leverage, cut its capital spending budget by two-thirds and reduce general and administrative expenses by half. We believe these actions show that management’s focus has shifted away from acreage growth and toward maximizing shareholder returns. Chesapeake’s shares are trading at less than the company’s book value and at just 11x earnings per share. We see this as a bargain price for such high quality oil and gas assets run by what we believe is a strong, shareholder-friendly management team.
From Bill Nygren (Trades, Portfolio)'s Oakmark Fund – 4Q 2014 Letter.
Another way we seek to capture losses is to replace losing stocks with similar, but equally attractive, stocks. An example in the Oakmark Fund from this past quarter was selling our remaining Cenovus (CVE) shares and redeploying the proceeds into Chesapeake (CHK). We believe Cenovus is a fine, well-managed company, but due to rapidly declining oil prices, it had fallen beneath our purchase price. Another company we believed was also fine and well-managed, Chesapeake, had fallen to a price where it appeared to us to be more attractive than Cenovus. So even though Cenovus was far beneath our sell target, we captured the loss, increased our exposure to an energy sector we thought was cheap and switched to a stock we believed was somewhat more attractive.
From Bill Nygren's 4Q 2014 Market Commentary.
