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Orbital utility contract and more +3

09:45 02-Dec-20


Orbital Energy Group has announced a Master Services Agreement with a midwestern investor-owned utility.  The company says this will increase revenues for the Transmission & Distribution division (aka Orbital Power Services) by 30% starting this quarter.  However, Orbital has not broken out revenues for this division, which was created when it bought Reach.  Total revenue for the restructured company is tracking toward $60M annually, so this contract is probably worth in the neighborhood of $10M per year.  That's significant, but probably not enough for profitability on its own.  OEG was up 8% to $1.33 pre-market, but is already giving back some of those gains.  In the current market environment it could represent a risky but reasonable buy-the-dips chance to take as the month progresses, as per my commentary yesterday.  Without government help, recent financing will mitigate the near term upside, but the market isn't looking near term and just surviving is likely to be positive for OEG shares.

The rest of the news this morning is fluff.  Nokia calls 5G green while deploying more small scale networks.  Lumen introduced a data replication service, which would only be useful when a network has lots of latency or bandwidth constraints, and Vodafone is developing a cloud call center service in cooperation with RingCentral.  BHP selected Shell to provide natural gas for its Western Australia to China iron ore carriers, making good on its promise to cut emissions.  Natural gas is back up above $2.90 and I think news like this is indicative of an emerging broader trend that will matter more to Golar than Shell.  Anyone invested in the latter company will still have to track oil, and should check tomorrow to see whether or not OPEC can manage to hold things together one more time.  Brent is currently at $47.39, with WTI just under $3 behind, but I see this as having more to do with €/$1.207.