MOSCOW (MRC) -- Saudi Arabian state oil giant Aramco said on Sunday it expects to cut capital expenditure after it reported a 44.4% slump in 2020 net profit, hit by lower crude oil prices and sales as the coronavirus pandemic depressed demand, said the company.
The company lowered its guidance for spending to around USD35 billion from a range of USD40 billion to USD45 billion previously, according to a disclosure to the Tadawul bourse.
Net profit fell to 183.76 billion riyals (USD49.00 billion) for the year that ended December 31, from 330.69 billion riyals a year earlier.
Analysts had expected a net profit of 186.1 billion riyals in 2020, according to the mean estimate of analysts in Refinitiv's Eikon.
Shares in the top western oil and gas companies including Royal Dutch Shell and BP dropped to multi-year lows in 2020. Exxon Mobil, the largest U.S. energy company, posted its first annual loss. Aramco also declared a dividend of USD75 billion for 2020 and signalled it was seeing pickup in oil demand.
As MRC reported before, a number of Saudi Arabia's companies, such as Tasnee, Sadara, Advanced Petrochemical and Saudi Kayan, announced a curtailment of feedstock to their petrochemical plants, including polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) facilities, by an average of 30-50% due to the attacks on key Saudi Aramco facilities in September 2019.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 241,030 tonnes in January 2021 versus 217,890 tonnes a year earlier. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market reached 141,870 tonnes in January 2021 versus 123,520 tonnes a year earlier. Supply of homopolymer PP and PP block copolymers increased.
MRC