Exxon Mobil Posts Record Profit

The oil company notched an annual profit of $39.5 billion, the largest ever by a U.S. company. You can leave your Ph.D. at home when connecting the dots between this and the Iraq war.

AP:

Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company—$39.5 billion—even as earnings for the last quarter of 2006 declined 4 percent.

The 2006 profit topped the previous record, also by Exxon Mobil, of $36.13 billion set in 2005. The record earnings amounted to roughly $4.5 million an hour for the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, which produces about 3 percent of the world’s oil.

It also equals the approximate gross domestic product—a measure of all goods and services produced within a country in a given year—of countries like Ecuador, Luxembourg and Croatia.

Also eyepopping was Exxon Mobil’s revenue, which rose to $377.64 billion for the year, surpassing the record $370.68 billion it posted in 2005.

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