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Halliburton sells the equipment, chemicals, and expertise that oil and gas companies need to drill and maintain wells.
Halliburton is one of the world's biggest oilfield services companies. It doesn't drill for oil itself and it doesn't own the oil. Instead, it sells the tools, chemicals, software, and people power that oil and gas companies need to find oil, drill wells, and keep them pumping.
The company runs on two main businesses. The bigger one is called Completion and Production, and it handles the work that happens after a hole is drilled — especially hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, where crews pump water, sand, and chemicals underground at high pressure to crack rock and release oil and gas. That sand often comes from Halliburton's own mines, which is a quiet advantage: it controls a key ingredient instead of buying it on the open market. The second business, Drilling and Evaluation, sells the thinking side of the job — tools that measure conditions deep underground while drilling, software that helps engineers plan wells, and testing services that tell customers whether a well is worth finishing. Customers are oil and gas producers, mostly big international and independent companies, plus national oil companies in places like the Middle East. They choose Halliburton because oilfields are complex and unforgiving: a service company that can show up with the right equipment, the right people, and a track record of making wells produce more oil is worth paying for. Its main rivals are SLB (formerly Schlumberger) and Baker Hughes. The business is brutally cyclical — when oil prices fall, producers cut drilling and Halliburton's revenue falls with them. It got hammered in the 2015–2016 downturn and again in 2020, when the pandemic crushed oil demand, and it has spent years since rebuilding.
One of the strangest chapters in its history is its 2014 deal to buy rival Baker Hughes for about $35 billion. The merger fell apart in 2016 after the U.S. government sued to block it, and Halliburton had to pay a $3.5 billion breakup fee — a huge, painful bill for a deal that never happened. Today the company leans on international markets, especially the Middle East and offshore fields, where drilling is more expensive and customers need more sophisticated help than in U.S. shale. It pays a dividend and buys back stock, and its fortunes remain tied to something simple: how much the world wants to drill.
Saved answer · last researched 19 Oct 2026