BP p.l.c., formerly British Petroleum, is an international British petroleum company headquartered in London. Worldwide, BP had consolidated sales of $396 billion in 2012 and employed 83,900 people. The company has proven reserves of 17.0 billion barrels of oil equivalent worldwide. The company owns around 20,700 petrol stations and serves 13 million customers every day. Due to an oil spill - triggered on April 20, 2010 by the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico - the company was sentenced in 2015 by the US environmental agency USEPA to pay a record fine of $20.8 billion. A 2019 survey found that BP, with an emissions of 34.02 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent since 1965, was the world's sixth-highest in that period.
With sales of $251.9 billion and a profit of $4.3 billion, BP ranks 36th among the world's largest companies according to Forbes Global 2000 (as of 2017). BP had a market cap of approximately $152.6 billion in early 2018.
According to BP's latest financial reports and stock price the company's current price-to-earnings ratio (TTM) is 3.35257. At the end of 2022 the company had a P/E ratio of -66.6.
The Price/Earnings ratio measures the relationship between a company's stock price and its earnings per share. A low but positive P/E ratio stands for a company that is generating high earnings compared to its current valuation and might be undervalued. A company with a high negative (near 0) P/E ratio stands for a company that is generating heavy losses compared to its current valuation.
Companies with a P/E ratio over 30 or a negative one are generaly seen as "growth stocks" meaning that investors typically expect the company to grow or to become profitable in the future. Companies with a positive P/E ratio bellow 10 are generally seen as "value stocks" meaning that the company is already very profitable and unlikely to strong growth in the future.