Islamabad, Nov 4: Higher liquefied natural gas (LNG) sales helped offset a steep decline in oil refining and trading earnings, resulting in Shell petrol reporting third-quarter profits of $6 billion on Thursday, a 12% increase over projections.
Together with a decrease in debt and robust cash flow, the outcomes may increase investor trust in CEO Wael Sawan’s plans to improve the company’s performance by the end of 2025 while concentrating on its most lucrative ventures, which are mostly in the oil, gas, and biofuels industries.
In the face of declining economic activity and the opening of multiple new refineries in Asia and Africa, global refining margins have plummeted in recent months. Meanwhile, oil prices plunged 17% during the quarter.
The refining and chemicals section of Shell petrol, which runs five refineries, suffered an annual decline in profits of about 70%. However, the British company’s largest business, its LNG sector, had a 13% increase in profits, offsetting that.
According to a note from Barclays analysts, “the consistency in performance is impressive.”
France’s TotalEnergies said declining refining margins and outages upstream crushed its profit outlook for the third quarter, which came in at $4.1 billion, lower than market consensus and the weakest since 2018.
Furthermore, on Tuesday, BP revealed its profits has declined 30% y-o-y to $2.3 billion, its lowest since 2004.
Foremost among today’s releases is the figure from America’s leading oil producers Chevron and Exxon Mobil due on Friday.
Although it was down 3% from the previous year, Shell’s adjusted earnings of $6.03 billion, or net profit, greatly surpassed experts’ projections of a $5.36 billion profit.
Similar to the previous quarter, the business announced that it would repurchase an additional $3.5 billion worth of shares over the following three months. At 34 cents per share, the dividend remained same.
