Exxon posts record-breaking $18b Q2 profit
Exxon Mobil Corp has declared its biggest quarterly profit today y reporting a second-quarter net income of $17.9 billion. This is equivalent to $4.21 per share which is an almost four-fold increase over the $4.69 billion, or $1.10 per share, it earned in the same period last year.
The results also beat its best quarter of 2008, when Brent crude oil prices peaked at $147 per barrel, and its best-ever quarter reached in 2012, when the company earned $15.9 billion, largely due to asset sales in Japan and tax-related items.
“Earnings and cash flow benefited from increased production, higher realizations, and tight cost control,” said Darren Woods, chairman, and chief executive officer. “Strong second-quarter results reflect our focus on the fundamentals and the investments we put in motion several years ago and sustained through the depths of the pandemic.”
He stated further: “Key to our success is continued investment in our advantaged portfolio, including Guyana, the Permian, global LNG, and in our high-value performance products, along with efforts to reduce structural costs and improve efficiency. We’re also helping meet increased demand by expanding our refining capacity by about 250,000 barrels per day in the first quarter of 2023 – representing the industry’s largest single capacity addition in the U.S. since 2012. At the same time, we’re supporting the transition to a lower-emission future, growing our portfolio of opportunities in carbon capture and storage, biofuels, and hydrogen.”
The quantum leap in profit is due to the increase in the prices of oil and natural gas attendant upon the Western sanctions against Russia, a major oil exporter, for the invasion of Ukraine.
Recall that in the first quarter, the company announced$5.5 billion earnings in the first quarter. commenting on the huge earnings, President Joe Biden of the United States said the company and other oil majors were capitalising on a global supply shortage to fatten profits. He said Exxon was making “more money than God” after posting its biggest quarterly profit in seven years
The company earlier this year more than doubled its projected buyback program to $30 billion through 2022 and 2023. Shell and Total on Thursday extended their share buybacks after their second-quarter results both beat what had been a record-breaking previous quarter.
Exxon has been using extra cash to pay down debt and raise distributions to shareholders. It maintained its 88-cent-per-share dividend for the third quarter.
Exxon kept its capital investments at $9.5 billion in the first half of the year, in line with full-year guidance. The profit included a $300 million booked identified item associated with the sale of the Barnett Shale upstream asset.
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