Cenovus cuts spending

Article Excerpt

CENOVUS ENERGY $22.92 (Toronto symbol CVE; Shares outstanding: 757.1 million; Market cap: $17.5 billion; TSINetwork Rating: Average; Dividend yield: 4.7%; www.cenovus.com) plans to spend $2.5 billion to $2.7 billion on exploration and development in 2015, down from the $3.1 billion it spent in 2014. The company has earmarked 75% of these funds for its existing refineries, oil sands and conventional oil properties. The rest will go to discretionary projects, like developing new oil sands projects and extraction technologies. Cutting capital spending is a prudent response to the recent oil price drop, which will likely reduce Cenovus’s cash flow by 18% in 2015, to between $3.5 billion and $4.0 billion. However, the company believes it can lower its annual costs by $400 million to $500 million by 2018. That should let it maintain its current dividend rate, which yields 4.7%. Cenovus is still a buy. buy. …