MOSCOW (MRC) -- PetroChina Co., China's largest oil and gas producer, has posted its lowest quarterly profit on record as weaker oil prices took their toll on earnings. The result missed some analysts’ estimates and its shares dropped, reported Bloomberg.
Net income at China’s biggest oil and gas producer fell 82 percent to 6.15 billion yuan (USD991 million) from 34.2 billion yuan a year ago, the company said in a statement.
"We expect this to mark the low point for the year,” Neil Beveridge, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said in an e-mail. "As oil prices recover in 2015, so should earnings," he said, noting that the result was lower than the consensus forecast.
Beijing-based PetroChina joined Cnooc Ltd., China’s biggest offshore oil and gas explorer, in reporting a decline in earnings after Brent, the benchmark for half of the world’s crude trading, tumbled 42 percent over the past ten months. PetroChina’s profit was the lowest since 2007, when Bloomberg started compiling quarterly data on the company.
Sales fell 22 percent to 410.3 billion yuan while the average realized crude price dropped 51 percent to USD48.87 a barrel from a year ago, according to the statement. Oil and gas output rose 4.9 percent to 381.2 million barrels of oil equivalent in the quarter.
As MRC wrote previously, PetroChina commissioned a new crude oil refinery in China in late 2015. Located at Anning in Yunnan province of China, the refinery has a crude processing capacity of 260,000 bpd.
Besides, we remind that on 9 April 2015, PetroChina Co. passed Exxon Mobil Corp. as the biggest energy company by market value for the first time since 2010. Exxon’s capitalization was USD352.6 billion compared with PetroChina’s USD352.8 billion as of 1:36 p.m. on Thursday, 9 April, in Shanghai. The Chinese company’s A shares surged about 61 percent the past year, versus Exxon’s 14 percent drop. PetroChina was larger by value most recently at the close of trading on June 25, 2010.
PetroChina Company Limited, is a Chinese oil and gas company and is the listed arm of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation, headquartered in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It is China's biggest oil producer.
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