Schlumberger, the world’s biggest oilfield services provider, changed its name to SLB and rebranded itself as a technology company to go after more work in the clean-energy space.
The Houston- and Paris-based company plans to continue operating its legacy oil and gas business while expanding in technologies that will help companies curb emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. The new name, the same as the company’s stock ticker symbol, took effect Monday.
“We couldn’t have done it at a better time at a critical juncture in our industry,” chief executive officer Olivier Le Peuch said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Digital is the future of this industry.”
The rebranding of SLB, which traces its history back almost a century, follows similar moves by other oil and gas industry giants to reflect a global push toward clean energy sources. France’s Total became TotalEnergies SE in last year, while Norway’s Statoil dropped the fossil-fuel reference from its name entirely in 2018 to be rechristened as Equinor SA.
Despite the focus on climate change, fossil fuel prices have surged this year, in large part due to the war in Ukraine. That’s thrown up the best opportunity in years for the world’s biggest oilfield contractors to cash in on an expansion in drilling, even as they try to capture business outside of what has traditionally been their core expertise.
SLB on Friday posted its highest third-quarter profit in seven years thanks to rising drilling activity in markets outside the US and Canada. The digital and integration unit, the smallest of its four businesses and the centerpiece of SLB’s effort to pivot toward the energy transition, posted $900 million in quarterly sales, trailing analysts’ expectations.
SLB’s renaming also follows a recent pattern established by US energy companies APA and NOV, which both took their new monikers from their stock ticker symbols.
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