Large investors were net buyers in oilfield services equities in the second quarter, with TechnipFMC PLC leading the pack of majors with 34.3 million net shares bought by big investors during the period.
Invesco Ltd., which completed its purchase of Oppenheimer Funds Inc. in May, purchased 17.7 million shares in TechnipFMC during the quarter, increasing its total stake in the company to 8.87%.

Technip's integrated subsea offering has become the industry standard. Despite offshore market struggles, sector leader TechnipFMC landed total contracts during the second quarter valued at a record $11.2 billion, or 22% higher than in all of 2018, it reported in July.
Subsea orders of $2.6 billion were in line with the robust levels experienced in the first quarter, Technip's CEO Douglas Pferdehirt said. During a second quarter earnings call, he noted Technip is well-positioned for full year subsea order growth of over 50% compared to the prior year.
After Technip's onshore/offshore segment boasted record sales of $8.1 billion in the quarter, the company is looking to leverage its offshore success and onshore and offshore business strengths with plans to demerge. Once the split is complete, one company will handle upstream business and another will focus on midstream and downstream opportunities.
Pferdehirt said Aug. 26 that the move is key to driving through-cycle project returns to attract the investment community, which widely applauded TechnipFMC's plan.
TechnipFMC was created in 2017 through the merger of Paris-based Technip and Houston-based FMC Technologies. The demerger — less than three years later — is not an attempt to unwind the 2017 merger, Wood Mackenzie principal analyst Mhairidh Evans said Aug. 27. Instead, the demerger is intended to take advantage of a changing market, she said.
Rystad Energy analysts also applauded the deal. "This move shows that TechnipFMC is a forward-thinking company with the ability to shape the business environment it operates in," Rystad's head of oilfield service research, Audun Martinsen, said.
Less enamored with the plan, Bernstein analyst Nicholas Green said he sees little evidence that the business will benefit from the demerger. He said Aug. 28 that it goes against the good arguments for the merger made by the same management team 2.5 years earlier.
"One endgame for the plan is to attract investors previously put off by [engineering and construction]," Green said.
Green's comments are in line with analysts with Tudor Pickering Holt & Co., who on Aug. 27 said they "love" the decision. The Tudor Pickering Holt analysts said a subset of the investor community would never be comfortable owning notable engineering and construction exposure within their equity portfolios.
Green said investor interest still may be limited by TechnipFMC's subsea engineering and construction business. "The long-dated endgame, we suspect, is acquisition: removing [engineering and construction] dramatically improves [TechnipFMC's] position as a target."
On the flip side, oilfield services behemoth Schlumberger Ltd. saw total net ownership in its business by institutional investors decline by 7.4 million shares, or 0.7%, in the quarter. ClearBridge Investments LLC sold 7 million shares in Schlumberger and UBS Asset Management AG sold 5.3 million shares.
Schlumberger on July 19 reported normalized earnings of $492 million for the second quarter. Earnings per share of 35 cents were down from 43 cents per share in the same quarter a year ago.
Despite struggles in North America land markets, the company's international business is performing well. The company remains on track to reach its goal of high single-digit growth across its international business in 2019, retired CEO Paal Kibsgaard said.
