Profits up 40% at Shell, 36% at Exxon

Posted on Jul 27, 2006

No need for creative accounting at these outfits: It’s good to be an oil company these days.

AP:

Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe’s second-largest oil company, said Thursday its second-quarter earnings jumped 40 percent as high oil prices offset production difficulties in Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico.

Net profit rose to $7.32 billion from $5.24 billion a year earlier. Sales rose less than 1 percent to $83.1 billion from $82.6 billion.

Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer said in a statement the earnings were “underpinned by overall good operational performance and not simply high energy prices.”

Still, the main reason for the increase was higher oil prices, with earnings at Shell’s oil exploration and production arm leaping to $4 billion from $2.75 billion, despite an 8 percent drop in production to 3.25 million barrels a day.

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AP:

Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday it earned $10.36 billion in the second quarter, the second largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company.

The earnings figure was 36 percent above the profit it reported a year ago. High oil prices helped boost the company’s revenue by 12 percent to a level just short of a quarterly record.

Exxon Mobil’s report comes a day after another large U.S. oil company, ConocoPhillips, said it earned more than $5 billion in the quarter and at a time when many drivers in the U.S. are paying $3 for a gallon of gas — increasing the likelihood of further political backlash in Washington.
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