Marathon Oil Corporation (MRO) on Friday announced the sale of its wholly owned subsidiary, Marathon Oil Gabon Ltd. (having a 56.25% interest in three offshore production fields) to London-based independent Perenco. 

The oilfields are Tchatamba Marin, Tchatamba South and Tchatamba West fields, with a combined gross production of approximately 15,000 barrels of oil per day. 

Marathon has been strategically divesting assets during the last few months. These include the sale of a 20% participating interest in Angola Block 32, all of Marathon’s holdings in Ireland , interests in Heimdal area offshore Norway and interests in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico. 

These sales are part of the company’s $2 billion to $4 billion asset divestiture program announced in March 2008. Marathon’s upstream activities are located in 11 countries, including the U.S., Canada , U.K. , Norway , Equatorial Guinea , Angola , and Russia . 

We like the company’s large and geographically diverse reserve base, competitive downstream operation and solid project pipeline. However, the challenging commodity-price environment will continue to weigh on the company’s revenue and profitability, at least in the near term. As such, we see the stock performing in line with the broader market and rate it as Neutral.
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