Woodside Energy Group Ltd. will cut about 11 percent of its workforce as it targets $400 million of annual cost reductions from 2028.
More than 500 jobs will be reduced globally, Australia’s largest natural gas producer said in a presentation for its Capital Markets Day on Thursday. The company had just under 4,700 employees, mainly in Australia and the US, at the end of last year.
“We have grown materially as an organization,” Chief Executive Officer Liz Westcott said during the Capital Markets Day presentation in Sydney. In recent years Woodside has inherited employees through its merger with BHP Group Ltd.’s oil and gas business, its acquisition of Tellurian Inc. and has also taken on ExxonMobil Holdings Corp. workers in the Bass Strait, Westcott said.
“When we look today at our organization, we can see there’s room for efficiencies,” she said.
Woodside also said it plans to pay out 20 percent of adjusted operating cash flow to shareholders, with as much as another 20 percent for dividends or share buybacks, it said. That is a change from the prior policy of paying as much as 80 percent of net profit after tax.
“The new policy more directly links distributions to the cash-generating capacity of the business and explicitly makes additional distributions compete with growth projects,” said Anh Dang, financial analyst at Accela Research.
The shift comes as Woodside seeks cost savings while bringing three major projects online. Scarborough in Western Australia is 99 percent complete and due to ship its first liquefied natural gas cargo this year, followed by first oil from Trion in Mexico in 2028 and first LNG from Louisiana in 2029.
The company expects sales volume growth of more than 30 percent to about 280 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2032, and to generate more than $40 billion of adjusted operating cash flow from 2027 to 2032, according to the filing.
Woodside shares fell as much as 6.8 percent in Sydney, after oil benchmark Brent lost 8.7 percent on Wednesday.
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