Tag: Chevron Corp

April 28, 2023

Swiss central bank promises regulation review after collapse of Credit Suisse

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Thomas Jordan, president of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), speaks during the bank’s annual general meeting in Bern, Switzerland, on Friday, April 28, 2023.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Swiss National Bank on Friday pledged to review banking regulations during its annual general meeting in Bern, following recent turmoil involving Credit Suisse.

Set against a backdrop of protest over its action on climate change and its role in the emergency sale of Credit Suisse to Swiss rival UBS, Thomas Jordan, chairman of the governing board at the SNB, said banking regulation and supervision will have to be reviewed in light of recent events.

“This will require in-depth analysis … quick fixes must be avoided,” he said, according to a statement.

The central bank played a key role in brokering the rescue of Credit Suisse over the course of a chaotic weekend in March, as a flight of deposits and plummeting share price took the 167-year-old institution to the brink of collapse.

The deal remains mired in controversy and legal challenges, particularly over the lack of investor input and the unconventional decision to wipe out 15 billion Swiss francs ($16.8 billion) of Credit Suisse AT1 bonds.

The demise of the country’s second-largest bank fomented widespread discontent and severely damaged Switzerland’s long-held reputation for financial stability. It also came against a febrile political backdrop, with federal elections coming up in October.

Jordan said Friday that future regulation will have to “compel banks to hold sufficient assets which they can pledge or transfer at any time without restriction, and which they can thus deliver as collateral to existing liquidity facilities.” He added that this would mean his central bank could would be able to provide the necessary liquidity, in times of stress, without the need for emergency law.

A shareholder holding a placard reading in German: “Invest in the planet and not in its destruction” takes part in a protest ahead of a general meeting of of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in Bern on April 28, 2023. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

Fabrice Coffrini | Afp | Getty Images

The SNB faced questions and grievances from shareholders about the Credit Suisse situation on Friday, but the country’s network of climate activists also sought to use the central bank’s unwanted spotlight to challenge its investment policies. Activists failed to gain traction with a vote to reprimand the SNB’s investment decisions, with just 0.8% of shareholders backing the move, according to Reuters.

Unlike many major central banks, the SNB operates publicly-traded company, with just over half of its roughly 25 million Swiss franc ($28.1 million) share capital held by public shareholders — including various Swiss cantons (states) and cantonal banks — while the remaining shares are held by private investors.

More than 170 climate activists have now purchased a SNB share, according to the SNB Coalition, a dedicated pressure group spun out of Alliance Climatique Suisse — an umbrella organization representing around 140 Swiss environmental campaign groups.

Around 50 of the activist shareholders were attendance on Friday, and activists had planned to make around a dozen speeches on stage at the AGM, climate campaigner Jonas Kampus told CNBC on Wednesday. Protests were also held outside the event with Reuters reporting that the campaigners totaled 100, leading to tight security.

The group is calling for the SNB to dispose of its stock holdings of “companies that cause serious environmental damage and/or violate fundamental human rights,” pointing to the central bank’s own investment guidelines.

In particular, campaigners have highlighted SNB holdings in Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, Repsol, Enbridge and Duke Energy.

Members of a Ugandan community objecting to TotalEnergies’ East African Crude Oil Pipeline, were also set to attend on Friday, with one planning to speak on stage directly to the SNB directorate.

As well as a full exit from fossil fuel investments, activists are demanding that the SNB implement the “one for one rule,” — a capital requirement designed to prevent banks and insurers benefiting from activities that are detrimental for the transition to net zero.

In this context, the SNB would be required to set aside one Swiss franc of its own funds to cover potential losses for each franc allocated to financing new fossil fuel exploration or extraction.

Ahead of the AGM, the central bank declined on legal grounds to schedule three motions tabled by the activists, and said on Wednesday that it would not comment on protest plans, instead directing CNBC to its formal agenda. Yet Kampus suggested that just the process of submitting the motions itself had helped expand public and political awareness of the issues.

“From all sides, there is public pressure and also political pressure that the SNB needs to change things. At this moment, the SNB is really far behind in terms of their actions taken compared to other central banks,” Kampus told CNBC via telephone, adding that the SNB takes a “very conservative view” of its mandate regarding price stability and financial stability, which is “very narrow.”

The shareholders’ cause is also backed by a motion in parliament, with support from lawmakers ranging from the Green Party to the Centre [center-right party], which demands an extension of the SNB’s mandate to cover climate and environmental risks.

“While other central banks around the world are going well beyond the steps taken by the SNB in ​​this respect — the SNB has repeatedly taken the position that its mandate does not give it sufficient leeway to take climate risks fully into account in its decisions and monetary policy instruments,” reads the motion, filed on March 16 by Green Party lawmaker Delphine Klopfenstein Broggini.

Swiss National Bank chair: Maintaining stability is our main goal

“The present parliamentary initiative is intended to ensure this leeway and to make it clear that the SNB must take climate risks into account when conducting monetary policy.”

The motion argues that climate risks are “classified worldwide as significant financial risks that can endanger financial and price stability,” concluding that it is in “Switzerland’s overall interest that the SNB proactively address these issues” as other central banks are seeking to do.

Kampus and his fellow activists hope the national focus on the SNB after the Credit Suisse crisis provides fertile ground to advance concerns about climate risk, which he said poses a risk to the financial system that is “several times larger” than the potential fallout from Credit Suisse’s collapse.

“We feel that there is also a window of opportunity on the SNB side in that they maybe this time are a bit more humble, because they obviously also have done some things wrong in terms of the Credit Suisse crash,” Kampus said.

He noted that the central bank has always asserted that climate risk was incorporated into its models and that there was “no need for further exchange with the public of further transparency.”

Investor who predicted Credit Suisse decline says Swiss banking model is 'damaged'

“Very central to the SNB’s work is that the public just needs to trust them. Trust is something that is very important to the central bank, and to demand trust from the public without leading up to it or supporting it with further evidence that we can trust them in the long run is quite scary, especially when we don’t know what their climate model is,” he said.

The SNB has long argued that its passive investment strategy, which invests in global indexes, is part of its mandate to remain market neutral, and that it is not for the central bank to engage in climate policy. Activists hope mounting political pressure will eventually force a change in legislation to broaden the SNB’s mandate to accommodate climate and human rights as risks to financial and price stability.

UBS and Credit Suisse also faced protests from climate activists at their respective AGMs earlier this month over investment in fossil fuel companies.

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March 7, 2023

Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub doesn’t seem worried about White House pressure on buybacks, oil prices

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Occidental (long known as Occidental Petroleum) was the No. 1-performing stock in S&P 500 last year, but it didn’t get there by way of massive growth in oil and gas production. While fossil fuels have the tailwind of the Russia-Ukraine war resetting energy policy and priorities around the globe, on Wall Street, it’s the recent capital discipline displayed by energy companies that has been as a big a factor in market performance.

The boom and bust cycles of the past when oil rig count exploded in line with the latest high price in crude oil are now seen as a cautionary tale. “We’ve seen that movie before,” Hess CEO John Hess said at the annual CERAWeek energy conference on Tuesday. That new fiscal approach from the energy patch has not made the White House happy, especially when oil prices and oil company profits were at a peak last year. The blowback from President Biden has continued, with recent buyback programs from companies including Chevron attracting renewed scrutiny. But when you listen to the way Chevron CEO Mike Wirth talked about its plans to increase the level of buybacks for shareholders, it seems the White House was an afterthought — if any thought was given to it.

Long-time energy sector analyst Paul Sankey put it this way after the recent Chevron earnings call: “I would be absolutely certain many in the White House own Chevron stock in their 401ks. In DC, it is clear that politicians have no comprehension of 1) what a buyback is and 2) how many Americans own stocks in their pension funds/401ks. The tone of Mike’s delivery, and he is a relaxed and confident guy, indicated that they were not really considering Washington, D.C.”

Wirth isn’t the only one sitting in the driver’s seat at a major oil and gas company who seems to have little time to worry about the way the White House views stock buybacks.

Occidental’s approach has attracted the world’s most-famous investor, with the company quickly growing to be among the top 10 stocks held by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway over the past several years (second to Chevron among Buffett’s public energy stock holdings). Buffett recently made clear (for the umpteenth time) what he thinks about politicians weighing in on buybacks.

With roughly 12% production growth, Occidental could produce more. And in fact, one point the White House has made is that oil companies are spending too much on “enriching” shareholders and not enough on producing more. But when asked by CNBC’s Brian Sullivan on Monday at CERAWeek if the company could produce more, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub answered in a direct way that defies any concern about political pressure:

“We do,” Hollub said, have the ability to produce more oil, “but we have a value proposition that includes an active buyback program and also a growing dividend and we always want to make sure we max out our return on capital employed. So we are very careful with how we structure our capital program on an annual basis to make sure we still have sufficient cash to buy back shares.”

Hess CEO on oil and gas demand

This year, Occidental authorized a new $3 billion share repurchase authorization and a 38% increase to its dividend. It completed $3 billion in share repurchases last year, with $562 million of repurchases in the fourth quarter.

“Look, we are a stronger company than we were a few years ago, so the numbers are bigger but the patterns are no different,” Chevron’s CEO Wirth told CERA chairman Daniel Yergin on Monday at the conference, referring to Chevron’s financial priorities – sustaining and growing its dividend, reinvesting capital to bring supplies to market (its budget is up 30% year over year), maintain a strong balance sheet for ups and downs in the commodities cycle, and returning excess cash to shareholders. “We could stack it up on the balance sheet,” Wirth said, but he added, “It’s their cash.”

“Some things get more scrutiny at certain points in time than others,” he told Yergin when asked multiple times about the political “heat.”

What to expect in gas prices at the pump

Frederick Forthuber, president of Oxy Energy Services, said separately at CERAWeek that U.S. oil production will grow by about 500,000 barrels per day this year, with 80% or 90% of that coming from the Permian basin, according to Reuters. Hollub noted in her CNBC interview that current capacity as measured in total barrels produced per day — nearly 12 million bpd in 2022 and projected by the EIA to reach over 12 million bpd this year — has not changed significantly from the pre-pandemic world, though the EIA forecast would be a new record. Its outlook for gas prices is an average $3.57/gallon this year.

Last year, U.S. oil production grew by 500,000 barrels, a figure noted by Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield during an interview with CNBC from CERAWeek, and he added that was well short of the most optimistic estimates to add one million barrels this year. When asked whether it wasn’t the energy industry’s job to increase production, Sheffield said, “No, our model has changed. We just don’t have that potential to grow U.S. production ever again.”

He added we may get to 13 million barrels in two to three years.

For consumers still worried about the price of gas at the pump, which has come down significantly along with crude prices from last summer’s high, don’t look to Hollub for more relief. Gas prices are right where they should be right now, she says, and are likely to stay this way.

“Prices are in a good place right now, in the $75-$80 range. That’s a sustainable price scenario for the industry to continue to be healthy and gas prices at the pump are not so bad at this price.”

In fact, she described the situation as “optimum.”

Crude has traded between $73 and $80 during the past four months.

“I do believe the mid-cycle price of oil is close to $80, maybe $75 to $80,” Hollub said. “In that price regime we can balance supply with demand over time,” she added.

If there is risk to gas prices this year, it’s to the upside. “I do think towards the end of the year we will have a little supply issue relative to demand, and it could send prices higher,” she said.

Strategic Petroleum Reserve

While the energy CEOs are showing through their words and actions this year that they aren’t buying the White House “Big Oil” rhetoric and will continue to message to the shareholders they’ve been able to win back, Hollub does expect one notable oil buyer to remain on the sidelines this year: the White House.

Amid high gas prices last year, the Biden administration released the most oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on record, 180 million barrels. While the administration has said it will be replenishing the SPR, Hollub doesn’t expect much buying.

“I think we should have more storage in the SPR and over time the administration will buy that storage back and start to refill, but it’s gonna be hard to do any time in the next couple of years, because I do believe we are in a scenario where prices will be higher.”

Among the reasons oil prices will remain higher?

“Lack of supply and lack of investment in our industry over the years,” Hollub said. “I do think they are going to have a difficult time here in the near term.”

Based on the way the oil CEOs are talking, maybe in more ways than one.

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March 3, 2023

The Russia-Ukraine war remapped the world’s energy supplies, putting the U.S. at the top for years to come

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An LNG import terminal at the Rotterdam port in February 2022.

Federico Gambarini | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine a year ago has shifted global energy supply chains and put the U.S. clearly at the top of the world’s energy-exporting nations.

As Europe struggled with threats to its supply of natural gas imports from Russia, U.S. exporters and others scrambled to divert cargoes of liquified natural gas from Asia to Europe. Russian oil has been sanctioned, and the European Union no longer accepts Moscow’s seaborne cargoes. That has resulted in a surge in U.S. crude and refined product shipments to Europe.

“The U.S. used to supply a military arsenal. Now it supplies an energy arsenal,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital.

Not since the aftermath of World War II has the U.S. been so important as an energy exporter. The Energy Information Administration said a record 11.1 million barrels a day of crude and refined product were exported in the week ended Feb. 24. That is more than the total output of either Saudi Arabia or Russia, according to Citigroup, and compares with 9 million barrels a day a year ago.

However, exports averaged about 10 million barrels a day over the four-week period ended Feb. 24. That compares with 7.6 million barrels a day in the year-ago period.

“It’s amazing to think of all those decades of concern about energy dependence to find the U.S. is the largest exporter of LNG and one of the largest exporters of oil. The U.S. story is part of a larger remapping of world energy,” said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global. “What we’re seeing now is a continuing redrawing of world energy that began with the shale revolution in the United States. … In 2003, the U.S. expected to be the largest importer of LNG.”

Yergin said the changing role of the U.S. oil and gas industry in the world energy order will be a topic of conversation among the thousands attending the annual CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston from March 6-10. Among the speakers at the conference are CEOs from Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Baker Hughes and Freeport McMoRan, among others.

“One of the ironies, from an energy perspective, is if you only looked straight back, where we were the day before the invasion … if you look at price, you would say not much has happened,” said Daniel Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners. “The price of global natural gas spiked but came back down. Oil is lower than where it was before the invasion. … The reality is we certainly have set in motion a rejiggering of global supply chains, particularly on the natural gas side.”

According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has been an annual net total energy exporter since 2018. Up to the early 1950s, the U.S. produced most of the energy it consumed, but in the mid-1950s the nation began to increasingly import greater amounts of crude and petroleum products.

U.S. energy imports totaled about 30% of total U.S. consumption in 2005.

“There’s a global LNG boom that has become much more apparent and visible to the market,” said Pickering. “We’ve shifted around who consumes what kind of crude and products. We’ve meaningfully changed where Russian oil moves to.”

India and China are now the biggest importers of Russia’s crude. “You look at those things, and to me, we very clearly adjusted the way the world is thinking about supply for the next four or five years.”

But a year ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it was not clear that the world would have sufficient supply or that oil prices would not spike to sharply higher levels. That is particularly true in Europe, where supplies have been sufficient.

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RBC commodities strategists said there were a number of factors at play that helped Europe get by this winter.

“A combination of warm weather, mandated conservation measures, and additional supplies from alternative producers such as the United States, Norway and Qatar, helped stave off such a worst-case scenario for Europe this winter,” the strategists wrote. “Countries that had relied on low cost Russian gas to meet their economic needs, such as Germany, raced to build new LNG import infrastructure to prepare for a future free from Moscow’s molecules.”

But they also point out that Europe is not in the clear, especially if the military conflict continues. “Key gas producers have warned that it could be difficult for Europe to build storage this summer in the absence of Russian gas exports and a colder winter next year could cause considerable economic hardship,” the strategists added.

Qatar has promised to send more gas to Europe, and the U.S. is building out more capacity. “In gas, we’re going to be a very real player. We’re trustworthy. We have rule of law. We have significant resources, and our projects are reasonably quick, compared to a lot of other potential projects around the world,” said Pickering. “My guess is we will go from [capacity of] 12 [billion cubic feet] of exports a day to close to 20, and we will be a big supplier to Europe.”

Pickering said U.S. exports are currently around 10 Bcf a day.

Among the companies he finds attractive in the gas sector are EQT, Cheniere, Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy.

The oil story is different. Pickering said the U.S. industry chose not to be the global swing producer. “We’re not the swing producer because we decided not to be with our capital discipline,” he said.

Energy companies now have earnings visibility that they did not have before, and that could be the case for another five years or so, Pickering said. Oil companies have not been overproducing, as they had in the past, and they did not jump in to crank up production despite calls from the White House in the past year.

The White House has also been critical of the energy industry’s share repurchase programs, which many have.

“They’re generating a lot of cash. They’re being rewarded by shareholders for being disciplined with that cash,” Pickering said. “You did see companies signal their optimism, like with Chevron’s $75 billion share repurchase.”

“The Russia, Ukraine dynamic may have ushered in an era where it’s cool to bash big oil, but my expectation is you can bash all the way to the bank and the political dynamic is very different than the financial and economic dynamic,” he said.

The U.S. now produces about 12.3 million barrels of oil a day, and Pickering does not expect that number to race higher. Producer discipline has helped support their share prices. The S&P energy sector is up 18% over the past 12 months, the best-performing sector and one of just three of 11 sectors that are showing gains. The next best was industrials, up 1.7%.

“Our absolute production levels are as high as they’ve been when you combine oil and natural gas. We were a net importer, and we’ve dramatically reduced that. It’s a massive shift,” said Pickering. “The shale boom benefited the energy sector. It benefited U.S. consumers. It was a terrible stretch for producers. They did their jobs too well. They overproduced. When we went from 5 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels a day, we were taking the most barrels away from OPEC. That was when we were most influential. We were the swing producer.”

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February 1, 2023

ExxonMobil, Chevron’s big cash shows cheap gas isn’t coming back

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If you want a quick outlook on whether U.S. gas prices are likely to return to pre-Covid levels, a good place to start is earnings reports from Chevron and Exxon in the last week.

The outlook: Don’t count on it. In their fourth-quarter earnings reports, both companies showed clear signs of Big Oil’s renewed focus on managing costs, widening profit margins as oil prices stayed relatively high even after coming down considerably from last year’s highs, and confidence that they will be able to keep passing the rewards back to shareholders.

On Jan. 25, Chevron announced a $75 billion share buyback, which will allow it to use excess cash flow to cut the number of shares by up to as much as 20% — over multiple years and contingent on shares also used for employee options programs and M&A rather than just earnings per share increase. Chevron also raised its dividend to about 3.4%, double that of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. On Jan. 31, Exxon announced it had spent $15.2 billion to acquire stock in 2022 – up from $155 million a year earlier, and authorized another $35 billion this year and next.

The moves are the latest page in the industry’s post-2020 playbook: To satisfy investors who pushed energy stocks down more than 40% in a rising stock market between 2014 and 2019, oil companies slowed down drilling overinvestment that had caused cash-flow losses estimated as high as $280 billion. With the conserved cash, they raised dividends and boosted stock buybacks – moves that helped oil stocks double in the year after the 2020 election, as U.S. gasoline prices rose by more than half.

Rob Thummel, senior portfolio manager at Tortoise Capital Advisors, which advises mutual funds on energy investing, said Chevron and Exxon are in position to increase the dividend, increase production, and buy back stock. “They are doing what mature companies do – generate a lot of cash and return it to shareholders,” he said.

Big oil sees political pushback on buybacks

The industry’s reallocation of money to shareholders from new drilling comes as political leaders, including President Joe Biden, criticize oil companies for not restraining the price of gasoline as crude oil rose from $53 when Biden took office in 2021 to $77.50 now.  Exxon’s fourth-quarter profit margin of almost 14% of revenue compares to 11% a year ago.

“My message to the American energy companies is this: You should not be using your profits to buy back stock or for dividends,” Biden said in October. “Not now. Not while a war is raging. You should be using these record-breaking profits to increase production and refining.”

The White House attacked both companies again this week after the buyback announcements.

In the market, and at the oil companies headquarters, it seems the opinions issued from the White House aren’t much of a factor in setting financial priorities. The price of oil is set on world markets, rather than by individual producers, Thummel said. The role of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, in limiting production is the biggest factor in world prices. U.S. oil production, which does not have a central organization setting prices, has rebounded from a post-Covid low reached in April 2021, and reached 383 million barrels per month in October, closing in on the all-time high of 402 million in December 2019, according to U.S. government data.

Gas prices are also being hit by a loss of refining capacity. Part of this is longer-term, as refiners phased out less profitable facilities during the Covid-related demand drop, and following a wave of mergers forced by declining cash flow and share prices. And part of it stems from temporary shutdowns for maintenance made necessary by the cold wave in much of the country in December, CFRA Research analyst Stewart Glickman said.

Of the two biggest U.S. oil producers, Chevron made the more dramatic changes in the fourth quarter earnings releases, since Exxon had announced its buyback acceleration earlier, Glickman said.

The benchmark now is to spend roughly a third of operating cash flow on capital investment, a third on dividends and a third on stock buybacks. The buybacks can be dialed back if oil prices fall, and would likely be the first big cost cut oil producers would make if crude fell back to $60 a barrel from the current range about $77, he said. Buybacks, unlike dividends, aren’t treated as a “must” by investors each quarter, while cutting a dividend can lead to mass selling by investors.

Chevron is pretty close to Glickman’s recipe, with $49.6 billion of 2022 cash flow yielding $11 billion in dividend payments, $11.3 billion in share buybacks that were accelerating as the year ended to the $15 billion annual pace, and $12 billion in capital investment – enough to boost U.S. production by about 4% even as its international production dropped. Exxon made $76.8 billion in operating cash flow, invested $18 billion back into the business, spent $14.9 billion on dividends and $15.2 billion in stock purchases, according to its cash flow statement.

“What we learned from [earnings announcements] is that the industry is very committed to a conservative approach to spending,” Glickman said. “They could [drill more], but they would have to sacrifice their return thresholds, and neither they nor their shareholders are interested. I don’t blame them.”

Oil production is increasing

Despite the push to pay out more money, the companies have begun to produce slightly more oil in the U.S.

Chevron said its U.S. oil production gain was led by a double-digit increase in the Permian Basin of Texas. Exxon also said Permian production led its U.S. results, rising by nearly 90,000 barrels per day.

“Growth matters when it’s profitable,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said on the company’s earnings call on Jan. 27. Chief Financial Officer Pierre Breber said the company’s four major financial goals are dividend growth, buyback growth, capital spending and reducing debt.

Slower growth and cash distribution is the right path for an industry that is growing more slowly, Thummel said, especially since the government is prodding utilities away from relying on natural gas to make electricity and offering consumers tax credits to swap gasoline-powered cars and SUVs for electric models.

In the early part of the last decade, investors applauded energy companies for investing more than their entire operating profit in new wells, believing that hydraulic fracking would propel the sector to a new wave of growth, Glickman said. And while U.S. production more than doubled during the fracking boom, it failed to produce the expected profit. Today, politicians are trying to foster a transition away from fossil fuels, making it dicey for Big Oil to invest in large offshore drilling plans that may need decades to pay off, he added.

“Why on earth would these companies agree to play ball with that kind of attitude?” he said.

The oil companies’ new approach stands in sharp contrast to that of EV maker Tesla, which has resisted shareholder pressure to begin buying back stock as it begins taking share in a market entwined with the oil companies. Tesla has hung on to its cash flow even as it completes a major factory-building campaign that has seen it add new plants in Texas, China, and Germany to its initial production facility in California. The company also produces batteries for its vehicles in Nevada.

That path works for Tesla because it is addressing a fast-growing market for EVs, while oil companies are trying to milk the cash from their existing, low-growth businesses and invest in new ones like carbon capture before current sources of cash flow like gasoline sales begin to shrink, Glickman said. But even Tesla should be returning cash to holders after a sharp decline in shares last year, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said.

“Our view is that it’s a no-brainer that Tesla should do a buyback now,” Ives said. “Tesla is in a robust position financially and this would send an important signal. The biggest capital spending is in the rearview mirror for now.”

But Tesla’s most obvious short-term use of its $22 billion cash hoard might be preparing for any possible impact on profits of the price cuts it announced Jan. 13.

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