Four pumpjacks on the prairie.Andrew Penner/Getty Images/iStockphoto
The pace of deals is picking up in the oil patch, with foreign buyers snapping up juniors focused on conventional oil.
It's hardly CNOOC-Nexen, but Eastern Europe's biggest publicly traded oil company is buying Trioil Resources for $184-million, picking up properties around Alberta.
That comes just two weeks after Yanchang Petroleum Group Ltd. of China agreed to buy Novus EnergyInc. for $320-million.
The transactions have a lot in common. Both are conventional oil producers and are well below the radar of the foreign-investment cops, but enable toeholds for a foreign company to get into the western Canadian sedimentary basin with a platform for further growth.
Both target companies spent many months running strategic processes – so long that it appeared that there was not much interest. And now both get sold within a few weeks of one another.
It's too early to call a trend, but it appears that the heretofore underappreciated junior growth stories in western Canada may be starting to see some real interest.
That's not going to generate the giant fees that the multi-billion dollar acquisitions in the oil patch were bringing, but it is welcome business and it's flowing in large part to the independent banks.
Cormark Securities and FirstEnergy Capital Corp. were the financial advisers for Novus.
On Trioil Peters & Co. was the main adviser.