BP shares have climbed 53% over the past year and 16% in the last three months, leaving the bp share price trading around where it stood at the start of the millennium even after a run of sharp gains. The rally has brought fresh attention to a stock that has spent decades moving with oil prices, geopolitical shocks and the company’s own bruising history.
The latest lift came after reports on 25 May that the US had struck a peace deal that would see Iran give up uranium and open the Strait of Hormuz, a route crucial to global energy flows. BP has been exposed to those swings before. Its shares plunged after the 2001 dotcom crash, fell again in the financial crisis in 2007, took another blow after the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010, and were hit once more by Covid lockdowns in 2020.
The scale of the company’s recent rebound matters because BP is still dealing with the consequences of earlier shocks. The Ukraine war drove up the oil price and forced the group to take a £25bn hit on its stake in Rosneft in 2022, even as higher prices supported the wider energy sector. That mix of pain and profit has become central to the case for the stock: BP can benefit when energy markets tighten, but it also pays when politics turns against it.
That was visible in BP’s first-quarter results on 28 April, when quarterly revenue rose by £5.3bn to £52.3bn. The trading division benefited as customers raced to secure energy supplies, underscoring how quickly demand and panic can lift results at a company tied so closely to commodity markets. The current windfall charge also accounts for around a third of the total taxes BP pays to the UK government, a reminder that the group’s earnings are still heavily shaped by policy as well as price.
Rachel Reeves scrapped a tax rule allowing oil and gas companies to offset UK profits against overseas losses, with the change intended to help fund a £1.8bn cost-of-living support package. For BP, that means the tax backdrop remains uncertain just as investors are reassessing the value of the shares after the recent rally. Buybacks remain on hold, adding another layer of caution for shareholders who would normally expect surplus cash to flow back faster when profits are strong.
BP’s story is not just about one good quarter or one geopolitical headline. It is about a company whose shares can surge on a peace report and still remain bound to the same forces that dragged them down for more than two decades. The question now is whether the recent rise reflects a lasting change in BP’s outlook, or just another turn in a market that has never let the company settle for long.
