Halliburton to Buy Boots & Coots, Adding Oil-Well Firefighting Services
by on APRIL 10, 2010
By Vivek Shankar April 10 (Bloomberg) — Halliburton Co. agreed to buy Boots & Coots Inc. for about $240.4 million in stock and cash, adding equipment and services to fight oil-well fires. Boots & Coots holders will receive $1.73 in cash and $1.27 in Halliburton stock per share, Halliburton said in a statement yesterday. The combined price, $3, is 28 percent more than Boots & Coots’ closing price yesterday. Both companies are based in Houston. The addition of Boots & Coots will allow Halliburton to offer a more complete suite of services to customers, said Marc Edwards , a senior vice president. Halliburton is the world’s second-largest oil-field services company after Schlumberger Ltd. Edward “Coots” Matthews , who died on March 31 at 86, founded the company in 1978 along with Asger “Boots” Hansen . For 20 years prior to that, they had worked with Red Adair, whose skill at battling oil-well fires was portrayed in the 1968 movie “Hellfighters,” starring John Wayne as Adair. Both Matthews and Hansen were involved in fighting well- known oil-well blowouts, including the “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter” in Gassil Touil, Algeria, in 1961 and another at Lake Maracaibo in 1991. They also extinguished the fires from 700 oil wells in Kuwait, blazes set by retreating Iraqi troops near the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, according to the company. For 2009, Boots & Coots reported net income of $6 million, or 8 cents a share, on revenue of $195.1 million. Halliburton said the boards of both companies had approved the transaction and it will close this summer. Boots & Coots had 80.13 million shares outstanding as of March 2, according to Bloomberg data. The stock fell 3 cents to $2.35 yesterday. It’s up 42 percent for the year. Halliburton fell 9 cents to $31.57 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading yesterday. The shares have climbed 4.9 percent this year. To contact the reporter on this story: Vivek Shankar in San Francisco at vshankar3@bloomberg.net
http://industry-news.org/2010/04/10/halliburton-to-buy-boots-coots-adding-oil-well-firefighting-services/Timeline of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
April 20: The MODU Deepwater Horizon deep-water oil drilling rig explodes and catches fire in the Gulf of Mexico at about 10 p.m. 126 people were on board, 11 go missing and at least 15 are injured. read
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/a_timeline_of_the_gulf_of_mexi.htmlFOLLOW THE MONEY-WHO BENEFITS FROM THIS? :tinfoilhat: