Purchase Comparison Of Occidental Petroleum(OXY) Versus Valero Energy(VLO)
Bradley Holbrook
Columbia College, Finance 350

When deciding between which two companies’ stocks or, from a corporate standpoint, to acquire, there are a multitude of aspects and ratios in which to utilize to determine the better buy. For the sake of time and space three are used in this comparison: book value per share, current ratio, and the profit margin on sales. Based on the following comparison of Occidental Petroleum (OXY) and Valero Energy (VLO), we will determine which is the stronger company of the two and which is worth spending money on for shares or acquiring..

Total common stock’s equity | Number of common shares outstanding | The first ratio used to compare the two is the book value per share. There are two ways that I’ve found to determine the book value, or net worth. One way is to “take everything that the firm owns and subtract the debt and preferred stock obligation.” (Block, 2014) The second way is to take the total common stock’s equity and divide it by the number of common shares outstanding, (financeformulas.net) so that if you wrote it down it would look like:

Book Value= |

According to the 10-K Form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2013 for Occidental Petroleum the common stock’s equity was $43.372 billion and the number of common shares outstanding was 794,747,955 shares. With the math done, OXY has a book value of over $54.57 per share. (Occidental Petroleum Corporation, 2014) We can get the same information for VLO’s from their 10-K Form filed with the SEC. For the year 2013 they had a total common stock equity of $19.460 billion and a total number of common shares outstanding of 532,510,263 shares. (Valero Energy Corporation, 2014) With the aforementioned formula, we reach $36.54 per share for the Valero Energy