MOSCOW (MRC) -- Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, reported a 53% rise in fourth-quarter income following tax and financial gains, rounding off that was still its least profitable year since 2004, according to Oil&Gas.
The company's net profit in the last three months of 2012 rose more than expected to BRL7.75bn (USD3.89bn) from BRL5.05bn in the same quarter of the previous year.
Analysts surveyed by Reuters had on average expected income for the quarter to reach only BRL6.21bn. Yet, Petrobras’s annual net profit of BRL21.2bn in 2012 was down 36% from the previous year and ranked as the company’s lowest annual income in eight years.
Petrobras said net revenue, or revenue minus sales taxes, rose 12.5% to BRL73.41bn in the fourth quarter from BRL65.26bn in the last three months of 2011. However, adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, or ebitda, dropped 15% to BRL11.94bn from BRL14.05bn in the previous year.
The company blamed the depreciation of the real against the dollar and higher operational costs for falling profits over the past year among the other reasons.
The rise in fourth-quarter net income, it said, was largely due to higher financial gains and lower taxes.
Petrobras’s sale of Brazilian Treasury bonds caused the company’s financial gains to soar almost 600% to BRL2.79bn during the fourth quarter from BRL400m the previous year. The company also said its profits were boosted by a BRL2.1bn income tax benefit that it chose to redeem during the period.
We remind that Moody's changed the outlook for Petrobras to "negative" from "stable," citing rising debt levels and growing uncertainty over how quickly the oil company can bring new production onstream. As MRC reported earlier, Petrobras plans to launch the first of its new refineries in November 2014. The second line will be put in operation in May 2015. The refinery will add 230,000 bpd of processing capacity.
Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. or Petrobras is a semi-public Brazilian multinational energy corporation headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the largest company in the Southern Hemisphere by market capitalization and the largest in Latin America measured by 2011 revenues.
MRC