The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

'greater beneficiary ... than anybody else' might be an exaggeration. I'm also suspicious of pegging growth to shale plays. I suspect only a tiny fraction of shale wells are cored. This is outside my expertise but I think that once a company has a good feel for the gamma ray signatures of the shale strata that they want to be in or avoid, they don't bother much with additional coring unless they're particularly interested in the geomechanical aspects and I don't think that is one of CLB's areas of expertise.

The thing about geographies has a downside. I don't know if it's still true but CLB operations in different areas used to be in competition with each other and there was some funkiness related to that which was entirely counter-productive (at least that was my impression when a former CLB person described their operations to me).

I also don't think the deep water biz is going gang busters these days. My impression is that companies want to be in N America and they want to be on land (in NAM). Elsewhere, being off in the ocean can be desirable. When I was at AAPG, one Brit I was talking to kept going on about how remarkable it was that non-NOC companies were pulling back to onshore US operations.

I do agree that 'service intensity' is ever increasing but who will do it is the question. I can't debate whether CLB has lost market share to their major service competitors but I wouldn't be surprised if the market is more insular and smaller now and thus the revenue drop. I'd examine how CLB parses their claims to ascertain how things are going (e.g. clients may be doing more work in-house and CLB isn't counting that as a market share loss).