I think this is a great time for investors with a longer-term time horizon to take a position in Schlumberger Ltd (SLB), which is still the pre-eminent energy services company in the world, suggests Elliott Gue, editor of Energy and Income Advisor.

To be sure, the past few years’ share price performance has been horrible. For the bull market that started in March 2009, shares have returned just 1.7 percent a year including dividends. The company itself, however, has kept its balance and sector lead over the past decade, as well as its A+ credit rating and generous dividend while consistently generating high levels of free cash flow.

That’s truly remarkable when you consider the extreme volatility in energy prices over that time, and especially the rise of shale. Shale’s growing importance in global oil and gas production has really turned drilling economics on its ear.

That’s created challenges for Schlumberger as well. One result is incoming CEO Olivier Le Peuch’s announcement earlier this month that the company would “resize” North American onshore operations and record a “sizeable non-cash” writeoff in the third quarter.

That bad news, however, was both long expected and has been very well reflected in Schlumberger’s share price. And the company’s plans to focus on digital investments driving its growth elsewhere has already convinced 23 of the 34 research houses covering the stock to shift bullish, leaving 10 holds and a sell to convince.

Schlumberger has long had a core competency in deepwater technology. The world really needs a balance between “short cycle” shale output and “long cycle” developments including deepwater.

With falling energy prices in 2014-17, spending on deepwater developments collapsed alongside most other projects outside North American shale so that business and expertise didn’t help them much. However, I do believe that’s changing.

We’re rated this stock a buy up to $65 for quite a while. It trades for barely half that. But we continue to believe Schlumberger is more than capable of revisiting its late 2014 highs that were close to $120.

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