Shares of Exxon Mobil Corp. were skyrocketing over 3% earlier this month ahead of the bell, when the oil giant reported fourth quarter financial results.
For the quarter, Exxon Mobil reported a profit that came ahead of expectations, but revenue however was a miss.
Net income for the period dropped to $6 billion, or $1.41 a share. This is compared to $8.38 billion, or $1.97 a share from the year ago period. This included a $5.9 billion benefit from tax reform. According to the FactSet consensus, earnings per share was expected to be $1.08.
Revenue for the quarter soared to $71.90 billion compared to $66.52 billion in the year ago period while the FactSet consensus had called for $72.53 billion.
For the last four quarters, ExxonMobil has surpassed consensus EPS estimates two times.
The company also reported that it saw production increase to 4.01 million oil-equivalent barrels per day from 3.99 million. This beat expectations of 4.00 million.
CEO Darren Woods said on the earnings call, “As I reflect on 2018, I am extremely pleased with the progress we’ve made on those plans. We not only delivered on our commitments for the year, we identified additional upside. The price environment in 2018 was unpredictable, which once again demonstrated the value of our integrated business model. We saw significant swings in commodity prices compounded by the transportation constraints in the Permian basin in Western Canada.”
“Our Upstream integrated logistics and manufacturing position allowed us to avoid the impact of market dislocations and, thus, capture the full value of our barrels. This reflects a deliberate strategy to leverage the scale and breadth of our integrated business model, which certainly paid off in 2018. Against the backdrop of a fairly volatile margin and price environment, we met earnings expectations for the year and generated $40 billion in cash flow from operations and asset sales, the highest level since 2014. This, in turn, enabled us to fund our ongoing investment program, reduce our debt, and consistent with one of our long-standing priorities, increase the dividend,” he added.
Woods also remarked, “In 2018, we increased our dividend by 6%, marking the 36th consecutive year of increases. Central to our plans for growing value is the advancement of a portfolio of advantaged investments. Throughout the year, we continued to develop and rigorously test our investments to make sure that our company’s competitive advantages were translating directly into project advantages, giving us some of industry’s lowest cost of supply. Developments over the past year have reaffirmed our belief in the strength of our investment portfolio, which is the best we’ve seen since the merger of Exxon and Mobil.”
“In fact, as we worked through the year, we identified significant upside to our plans, which brings me to a critical focus area of 2018, on delivering on the project milestones for the plans that we laid out back in March. We remain extremely confident in our ability to deliver on our plans.” Recently the company announced a final decision to expand its Beaumont, Texas, refinery to process a surge of production from shale fields in the Permian Basin. This would help the Beaumont facility become the second largest in the United States after Saudi Aramco’s Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, Texas.
