By the late summer of last year, the shares had reached an astonishing all-time high of more than £13.You'd have to have been on another planet to have missed what's happened to the telecommunications equipment market since, but the upshot is that the shares at 381p are back down to below the level they were at before the transformation began There will be a wry smile from Lord Weinstock, at least. The former GEC managing director had been pretty much airbrushed out of the official Marconi history for his last 10 years of apparent drift and underperformance. Creating long- term shareholder value, he might reasonably observe, is not as easy as it looks.None of this is to say that Mr Mayo has got the strategy wrong. Yesterday's figures were not nearly as bad as they might have been, and Mr Mayo is probably right in anticipating that the market ought to begin to recover by the end of this calendar year. Unlike others, Marconi has also been cautious in vendor financing its customers ­ in effect lending them the money to buy its equipment ­ and bad debt experience ought therefore to be kept to a bare minimum.None the less, the figures do contain some worrying elements. Inventories have climbed during the course of the year by more than £1bn, greatly adding to group debt and resulting in a net cash outflow of £106m.

Mr Mayo is confident of the quality of this inventory and does not anticipate the need for write-offs of any significance. However, his insistence that the inventory problem will be reduced this year allowing the company to move towards its target of converting two-thirds of operating profits into cash, must depend on a recovery in the market That's by no means assured. Only one thing is really sure ­ that it will be another nail-biting year for Mr Mayo.Tigers and ShellYou are more likely to learn about Bengal tigers, Tibetan monks and Colombian tree frogs than what's going on in the oil industry if you go to an oil company annual general meeting these days Yesterday's Shell agm was no exception. Oil company agms have become the focus for a huge array of different protest groups.

Top of the pops, though, is still the big picture of global warming and the oil industry's part in it.Climate change has always been an impossible issue for the oil companies to deal with, since to admit that you are part cause of the problem is to question your right to exist. Both Shell and BP took this difficult step a few years back, leaving only Exxon Mobil, the rednecks of the industry in so many respects, still in a state of denial. Even Dubya, when he withdrew from the Kyoto agreement on climate change, didn't go so far as to argue that global warming has nothing to do with man-made causes, and yet Exxon continues to pour money into scientifically proving this to be true.The other two have largely accepted that it is not, and they have won some credit from environmentalists for doing so. But has it made them think about reducing production? No, it has not. All the predictions are that worldwide oil consumption will continue to rise steeply for the next 20 to 30 years. At present there is no viable alternative in sight, meaning that the oil companies, whether they be Exxon, BP or Shell, will have to drill in ever more inaccessible and environmentally sensitive places in order to keep production growing. These agms are going to be a focus for protest for a good few more years yet.j.warner independent.co.uk.