Subject: Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?
@Texirish - thanks for a good post on XOM. I too went through their Corporate Strategy deck and was impressed with their 2025-2030 plans. However, it appears that some in the market are not as there's been selling pressure every day since the presentation.

https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfro...

Upstream - Permian, Guyana basin, LNG

Product Solutions - refined products (commodity and specialty chemicals), includes new Proxxima resin

Low Carbon Solutions - carbon capture, low-carbon (gray) hydrogen, lithium

Of those divisions, the first two are pretty well defined and the cost cutting and reorganization of business functions should drive cash flow.
The last of those is a big question mark with FID coming in 2028 and 2029 for hydrogen and lithium projects. There's likely to be a lot of investment in those projects with a great deal more risk than for Upstream and Product Solutions. That's my guess at what the market doesn't like. Exxon didn't break out capital investment by division or by projects so we can't really see how costly these LCS projects will be. The last thing that I didn't like about the presentation is the lack of per share metrics. Exxon made a big splash about earnings growth and cash flow etc. but did not present in per share metrics. I wanted to see that focus on growing EPS and CF/share.