MOSCOW (MRC) -- Shell will increase its dividend and buy back more shares after high prices for oil and gas helped it deliver bumper full-year earnings after a strong fourth quarter, reported Financial Times.
The UK-headquartered oil group’s adjusted earnings for 2021 - the profit measure most closely tracked by analysts - rose to USD19.3bn, from USD4.8bn a year earlier when the pandemic hit oil demand.
Earnings for the last three months of the year were USD6.4bn, beating average analyst estimates of USD5.2bn and up from USD393mn in the same period a year earlier and USD2.9bn in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said 2021 had been a “momentous year” for the business. As a result, the company was “stepping up” its distributions to shareholders, he said, with a commitment to buy back USD8.5bn in shares in the first half of 2022 and raise its dividend by roughly 4 per cent to 25 cents a share in the first quarter.
The bumper profits mark a stark turnaround for the group after a bruising 2020, when Shell recorded its lowest earnings since the unification of Royal Dutch and Shell Transport in 2005 and the only annual loss in the company’s history.
As MRC wrote before, Shell Chemicals expects its new petrochemical complex in southwest Pennsylvania to come online by the end of 2022, Royal Dutch Shell CFO Jessica Uhl said February 3, during the company's Q4 2021 earnings call.
We remind that Royal Dutch Shell plc. said in November, 2021, that its petrochemical complex of several billion dollars in Western Pennsylvania is about 70% complete and in the process to enter service in the early 2020s. The plant's costs are estimated to be USD6-USD10 billion, where ethane will be transformed into plastic feedstock.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MR''s ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,265,290 tonnes in the first eleven months of 2021, up by 14% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 1,363,850 tonnes in January-November, 2021, up by 25% year on year. Supply of homopolymer PP and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of injection moulding PP random copolymers decreased significantly.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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