Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamics surrounding British Petroleum(BP), an international oil and gas company, more so after the DeepWater Horizon oil spill of 2010.
The paper considers the internal and external factors that continue to affect BP after the disaster that has been associated with drilling challenges.

Analysis begins at Porter’s five forces that affect the intensity of industrial competition. It then looks at the external factors affecting its comeback.
This reveals opportunities for BP that include: technological development, internationalization of retailing and one of the Porter’s force of barriers to entry.

The threats realized from external analysis: legislative impediments, debts, stiff industry competition, natural disasters and extreme weather conditions.
Internal factors laid out in the paper are classified by the core competency analysis (a resource-based view) and divisional strengths and weaknesses.

The problem analysis is done through a SWOT analysis, SPACE matrix, BCG matrix and a comparison of Internal-External matrix. This is to offer a broad view of all the strategies available to BP.

1. Introduction

1.1 Company Overview

British Petroleum, BP, is an international company that locates, produces and develops energy sources into oil and gas to power economic growth in the 72 countries that it operates in.
The company employs about 74 thousand employees globally with sales and other operating revenues summing up to over 183 billion dollars.

It has the capacity to produce approximately 3.3 million barrels of oil per day with proved reserves of about 17,810 million barrels of oil.
The giant of the energy industry has an area of about 71,000 square kilometers of explorations sites all over the globe.

The energy sources are refined at a rate of 1.7 million barrels of oil daily with about 14.2 million tons of petrochemicals produced.

The oil and gas produced is sold at over 18,000 retail sites throughout the world.
However impressive these numbers must be, it has six other top competitors: Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Eni, ConocoPhillips, Total and Royal Dutch Shell. They are all collectively known as the “supermajors”.

Table 1 presents an overview of relevant corporate information.

Table 1: Corporate Information

Company Name and other subsidiaries BP P.L.C. Amoco

Corporate Headquarters Address: London, United Kingdom

CEO: Robert Warren “Bob” Dudley

Annual Sales Volume: $135,630,000,000

Total Number of Employees: 74,500 employees

1.2 Current Issues

Currently, BP has been awarded a contract by Amec Foster Wheeler that covers both greenfield and brownfield upstream engineering services, onshore and offshore, subsea and finally drilling services.
The contract will run in the Gulf of Mexico, Egypt, Alaska, Azerbaijan, Oman among other oil and gas producing countries.

The three-year contract is for front end engineering and design of all engineering, project management and procuring services.
Another contract has been awarded to Aker Solutions for potential deliveries of subsea production systems and lifecycle services at BP fields.

The company is supposed to cover all the engineering equipment for BP from construction to maintenance.
As will be discussed further in this paper, suppliers are important in any industry. They help anchor the business in the market.

Investments of this kind assure BP of a steady flow of products to ultimately provide to the consumers. This will go a long way to propagate the company moving forward allowing it to compete.

1.3 Core Competencies

Core competencies are those that offer the enterprise an opportunity to have a competitive advantage in the market place.
At the moment, there is a growing global demand for energy.
Oil, gas and coal are all the dominant sources of energy for the world with gas slowly edging further up the list as coal becomes more and more unpopular.

Although there is a considerable potential for renewables, it is a safe bet that they would not outrun the oil and gas industry at least by the year 2035.
The future of oil demand, although under pressure from new technologies like the electric car, is still bright.
This is held by oil and gas being produced cheaply offering an important competitive advantage over the emerging renewables like nuclear and hydroelectric power.

The major growth occurring in this industry is because of the lowering cost of production coupled with the growing capacity of producing all due to the development of technology.
The rising population and economies of countries like China and India make oil and gas a stable industry at least for the first half of this century.
BP has been around for a while and this experience garnered from years of operation guarantee it an edge of any emerging companies that may be in potential competition.
This makes BP continually profitable.

Moreover, the use of new and edgy technology by the industry giant increases the ability of the company.
The oil spill has caused BP to adopt different approaches to production, distribution and manufacture.
Eventually, these will prove essential to adding a competitive advantage over other industry giants.

Now that BP is trying to recover consumer confidence in the shadow of the oil spill, it puts itself in a position to be an option of green energy in terms of better methods of getting the product from the ground to the customers.

2. External Analysis

2.1 Porter’s Five Forces and Industry Analysis

Michael Porter concluded that a deep understanding of a company’s external environment is crucial for the firm to achieve success.
There are five forces that effect the intensity of competition and consequently the attractiveness of the same industry of British Petroleum, or any firm, according to Porter.

These include: (1) the potential of new entries into the industry, (2) industrial competition or rivalry, (3) bargaining muscle of suppliers, (4) bargaining muscle of customers and (5) the threat of a substitute product. If these five forces are properly understood then suitable strategies can be developed to deal with threats and seize opportunities in an organized manner (Porter, 2008).

The first, potential of new entries into the industry is divided into demand-side and supply-side.
It is generally barred by capital requirements to start the business, laws and policies formulated by the governments of the country of operation, acquisition of proprietary technology for brand equity and high operational costs.

The oil and gas industry has very high supply-side barriers as the initial cost of star- up of such a business is extremely high.
Since it is so difficult for a new company to enter the industry., this is not a major threat for BP. Apart from initial capital being high, operational costs are also very expensive.

The refining and distributing process of oil and gas is very high making it difficult for new players to contemplate entering the industry ("How strong are the barriers to entry in the oil and gas sector?", 2017).
Government policies also play a very big role in this industry as they are the ones that regulate it.

Taxes are usually particularly high for this sector since it is a high profit earner and thus the companies already in the industry can afford it.
Environmental regulations are an important consideration in this first force.

Global warming has put the world on high alert and gestures like the signing of emission caps by the leading powers of the world just show the importance of fossil fuel regulation.
This makes the industry all the much harder to enter since it revolves around this very issue ("BP SWOT & Five Forces Analysis following Implications of IS/IT", 2017).

The second one is rivalry.
Competition is present in all industries and it helps to bring out the best in companies.
This industry is however run by the “supermajors” in the entire global market.
The fact that all the major players produce and retail the same product increases competition among them (Weston et al.,2001). In addition to

BP case analysis method A case analysis method in a “Live Case”...