Irving - Exxon Mobil posted its worst quarterly performance in six years as a worldwide glut of oil collapsed prices faster than explorers trimmed costs.
Net income fell to $4.19 billion, or $1 a share, from $8.78 billion, or $2.05, a year earlier, the Irving, Texas-based company said in a statement on Friday. The per-share result was 11 cents lower than the average $1.11 estimate of 20 analysts in a Bloomberg survey.
Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson was among the first oil-industry bosses to shrink spending as the crude rout began taking shape more than a year ago.
After cutting the budget by 9.3 percent in 2014, this year’s reduction may exceed the original 12 percent target, the company disclosed during an April 30 conference call with analysts.
Tillerson, an Exxon lifer whose 10th year as CEO began in January, has been pessimistic about the prospects for an imminent oil-market rebound.
On April 21, he told a Houston energy conference that the supply glut and low prices will persist “for the next couple of years” at least.
Those remarks proved prophetic: international crude prices that rose 45 percent between January 13 and May 6 have since tumbled 21 percent, inaugurating the second oil bear market in 14 months.
Even as Tillerson cut spending and re-evaluated whether some multi-billion dollar projects make economic sense with oil around $50 a barrel, the company has discovered a field off the coast of Guyana that the government said may hold the equivalent of more than 700 million barrels of crude.
Such a prize would be worth about $40 billion at current oil prices.
BLOOMBERG