MELBOURNE, May 4 (Reuters) - Recovering from a horror year, Australian oil and gas producer Santos Ltd STO.AX is concentrating on cutting costs and debt to withstand weak oil prices before considering selling any assets or expanding, its new chief said on Wednesday.
Chief Executive Kevin Gallagher faced his first annual meeting on Wednesday after having joined the company in February shortly after its shares hit a 23-year low.
He told shareholders his goal was to improve the performance of all the company's operations so that the portfolio as a whole was cash flow break-even at $35 to $40 a barrel of oil equivalent, which is below current prices.
Santos put all its assets up for sale last year, but in the end rejected a takeover offer, sold one gas field stake and instead raised A$3 billion in a share sale to help cut debt.
"There's no active asset sales process in play at this time," Gallagher told reporters following the annual meeting.
He said his sole focus was to slash costs, though he declined to say how many of the company's nearly 3,000 jobs might be axed in the process, following the loss of more than 800 jobs last year.
Gallagher has nearly completed a review of all of the group's assets and said the good news was that they all had growth prospects.
"But we have to go through that process of stabilising the business, becoming a low cost, high performance business and reducing our debt in order to be able to develop those opportunities," he said, declining to give a time frame for each of those steps.