MOSCOW (MRC) -- Top Asian refiner China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) has posted a better-than-expected 7.5% increase in first-half profit as refining margin at Asia’s biggest refiner widened and production climbed, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Net income was 32.5 billion yuan (USD5.3 billion), or 0.28 yuan a share, in the six months ended June 30 from 30.3 billion yuan, or 0.25 yuan, a year earlier, the Beijing-based company, known as Sinopec, said Friday in a filing to the Shanghai stock exchange. The average of six analyst estimates, compiled by Bloomberg, was a profit of 30 billion yuan.
Sinopec is at the forefront of a China government push to restructure state-controlled companies and allow markets a bigger role in the allocation of resources. The company is seeking to raise 100 billion yuan selling about a third of its retail unit.
"China’s slower economic growth had a negative impact on Sinopec’s fuel-retailing business and it somehow managed to balance the loss by achieving higher margins in refining," said Shi Yan, an analyst at UOB Kay Hian in Shanghai. "Profit should stay flat in the second half unless Sinopec can register major production increase in its shale gas unit."
Operating profit for the refining business rose almost 46 times to 9.7 billion yuan in the period from a year earlier, according to an English earnings statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Shale gas production reached 3.2 million cubic meters a day at Fuling, China’s biggest shale-producing project, in Southwest China’s Chongqing, it said.
As MRC informed before, in November 2013, Sinopec won initial approval last month from China's top economic planner for a plan to build a USD10-billion refinery and petrochemical complex in Shanghai. China, the world's largest net importer of oil, is likely to add 3 million barrels per day, or a quarter of new refining capacity, between 2013 and 2015 to fuel economic growth, industry officials and Chinese media estimate.
Sinopec Corp. is one of the largest scale integrated energy and chemical companies with upstream, midstream and downstream operations. Its refining and ethylene capacity ranks No.2 and No.4 globally. The Company has 30,000 sales and distribution networks of oil products and chemical products, its service stations are now ranked third largest in the world.
MRC