Investing Blog

ExxonMobil is the world’s largest publicly traded oil company. They have said that their second-quarter profit fell 1% from a year ago due to lower natural gas prices. However, their net income of $10.26 billion was the fourth-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company. As such, if you own their stock, you can expect it to earn $1.83 per share, this is up from the $1.72 that it was earning a year ago, but still falling short of the $1.96 that was forecasted. According to a spokesman for ExxonMobil this is because there were fewer shares on the market thanks to an ongoing stock buyback program, thus their production fell 17% to $5.9 billion and production on an oil-equivalent basis fell 1% from a year ago. Some other things that helped the company was higher global refining and marketing margins, which profited them $3.4 billion (a 37% increase), and the sale of a German refinery. The company’s revenue did dip slightly to $98.35 billion from $99.03 billion a year ago but this may be because it bought 99 million shares of its common stock in the quarter at a cost of $8.1 billion. Of course, the company’s outstanding shares also fell to 5.5 billion at the end of the second quarter from 5.6 billion at the end of the first quarter. Nevertheless, this looks as though it will be a good year for ExxonMobil. In the first six months of 2007 alone, Exxon Mobil posted record earnings of $19.5 billion or $3.45 a share, up 4% from $18.76 billion or $3.09 a share from a year ago.

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