Friday’s earnings report for Exxon Mobil Corp.’s third quarter showed a profit beat that made up for a miss on sales. The company also raised its quarterly dividend by 4%.
Chief Executive Darren Woods said in prepared comments, “We had one of our best third quarters in ten years.” The company said that 3.2 million barrels of liquids were created every day, which was the most in 40 years.
Exxon XOM made $8.61 billion, or $1.92 a share, for the quarter. This is up from a loss of $630 million, or 22 cents a share, during the same time last year. From $90.760 billion to $90.016 billion, sales went down. The stock went up a little on Friday.
Based on FactSet, most people thought that the company would make $1.87 per share and bring in $93.982 billion.
Jefferies analyst Lloyd Byrne said in a note Friday that the results were “solid,” which was better than expected because the company produced and realized more liquids and had some timing issues in its drilling and production.
Third Bridge expert Peter McNally wrote in a note that this was the first quarter since Exxon completed its purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources. The deal, which was worth more than $60 billion, increased the company’s investments in the Permian Basin in West Texas. “Both overall upstream production volumes and profits were a little higher than what Wall Street expected,” he said.
Analysts at TPH agreed that the quarter was “solid,” but they pointed out that Exxon’s chemicals business was a problem. The company’s profit was $893 million, up from $779 million in the second quarter and the highest in more than two years, but it was still less than the $1.04 billion that was expected.
Oil company Exxon said it had $17.6 billion in cash flow from operations and $11.3 billion in free cash flow. The company expected capital and research costs to be $28 billion for the whole year, but they were only $20 billion.
Woods said that the company’s attempts to change are making it more likely to make money in the long term.
He said that the company as a whole had saved $11.3 billion in fixed costs since 2019.
More than 4.6 million oil-equivalent barrels were produced every day, which was more than the 4.6 million barrels a day that FactSet predicted.
Upstream earnings were $6.2 billion, which is $916 million less than the second quarter. This is because lower crude prices and higher exploration costs were partly cancelled out by higher output and cost savings.
The money made from energy goods was $1.3 billion, which is $400 million more than the second quarter.
The company said in a statement that lower scheduled maintenance and favorable derivatives mark-to-market timing effects more than made up for lower industry refining margins and effects from a tornado-related shutdown at the Joliet refinery in Illinois. The refinery had a safe and quick restart ahead of expectations.
From the second quarter to the third, specialty goods brought in $794 million, up from $751 million.
The business also made progress on its carbon capture and storage project and announced that a new customer deal means it will take in an extra 6.7 million metric tons of CO2 every year.
Exxon raised its quarterly payout to 99 cents per share. Shareholders whose accounts were open as of Nov. 14 will receive the new payment on Dec. 10.
So far this year, the stock has gone up 16.8%, while the S&P 500 SPX has gone up 19.6%.
