Equinor is set to become the third most profitable company in the world before taxes: – Totally sick sums

“That’s quite satisfactory sums, we should be happy to have Equinor in Norway,” says Robert Ness, chief investment officer at Nordea, running on his way to work Friday morning.

He did a relatively interesting arithmetic exercise. Ness researched Bloomberg Network, which has accounts, quarterly figures and analyst estimates for nearly 60,000 listed companies in the world, and extracted all companies out of pre-tax earnings.

Then he sorted the companies by their estimated pre-tax profit size, and found Equinor right at the top of the podium – with an estimated NOK 837 billion pre-tax revenue in 2022.

Admittedly, the platform is based on numbers from analyst estimates. These take into account the recent increase in gas prices to a greater extent than the numbers from the first two quarters of the year, and Næss says there are so many analysts following the company that the number becomes true — at least in an informal context like these.

With that revenue, Equinor is more profitable than tech giants like Microsoft and Alphabet owner Google – but also more profitable than oil and gas giants like Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil.

Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil are bigger than Equinor in oil, but Equinor is bigger in gas. Equinor delivers to Europe – Næss explains that it is European gas prices that make Equinor’s pre-tax result so unique.

Based on Bloomberg’s numbers, Ness also calculated three more results:

• Equinor alone generates more pre-tax profit than all the companies included in the Stockholm main index combined.
• Equinor is on track to generate more pre-tax profit than all the companies in the world in the bottom half of the list of all profitable companies – combined. The bottom half of the list includes just under 15,000 companies.
• The estimated profit before tax corresponds to NOK 237,000 per household in Norway – based on Equinor’s 67 percent state ownership share.

The idea behind the calculation comes from a similar calculation that Næss did a year ago. Then it was found that Equinor pays the second highest tax in the world. (Conditions)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases using the links that lead directly to our pages. All or part of the Content may not be copied or otherwise used with written permission or as permitted by law. For additional terms look here.