LONDON: Oil company Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday reported better-than-expected profits, though sales were hammered by the drop in global energy prices.<\/p>\n
It said its first-quarter profit rose 7 percent, thanks to a good performance in the refining division as well as to the fact that year-earlier figures were weighed down by one-time charges.<\/p>\n
The current cost of supplies, a measure of profit used in the industry that strips out fluctuations in the value of oil stocks, increased to $4.76 billion from $4.47 billion in the first quarter last year. Net profit attributable to shareholders fell to $4.43 billion from $4.51 billion, better than market expectations for a drop to $2.40 billion.<\/p>\n
Revenue plunged to $65.71 billion from $109.67 billion a year earlier. Despite the sharp drop, the figure was also not as bad as investors had feared.<\/p>\n
“In what is clearly a difficult industry environment, we continue to take steps to further improve competitive performance,” said CEO Ben van Beurden.<\/p>\n
Shares in Shell were up 1.6 percent in morning trading in London.<\/p>\n
Van Beurden said that Shell will, after its announced takeover of BG Group for 47 billion pounds ($70 billion), look to sell more nonstrategic investments. It has sold assets for over $2 billion so far this year.<\/p>\n
The company announced a dividend of $0.47 per share for the first quarter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Oil company Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday reported better-than-expected profits, though sales were hammered by the drop in global energy prices. It said its first-quarter profit rose 7 percent, thanks to a good performance in the refining division as well as to the fact that year-earlier figures were weighed down by one-time charges. The current cost of supplies, a measure of profit used in the industry that strips out fluctuations in the value of oil stocks, increased to $4.76 billion from $4.47 billion in the first quarter last year. Net profit attributable to shareholders fell to $4.43 billion from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}