Equinor approaches its best quarter in nearly ten years

Equinor benefits from benchmark gas prices and solid oil prices. Now the company has published its own reports, every three months Analyst poll, showing that they expect, on average, a third-quarter adjusted operating profit of $8.4 billion – 70 billion kroner at today’s exchange rate.

Measured in dollars, which is the currency Equinor refers to, it would be the best quarterly result since the first quarter of 2012, in nearly a decade, according to Bloomberg figures. The company will present the quarterly report next week.

At the time, however, Statoil was mentioned at the time in NOK. In that quarter, adjusted operating profit was NOK 59 billion.

Norway is better

It is the Norwegian continental shelf that carries the burden: here the adjusted operating profit comes to $6.7 billion. Norway accounts for about two-thirds of Equinor’s production, and the company is the second largest supplier of natural gas in Europe, after Russian giant Gazprom.

In the third quarter, European gas prices went from record to record on an almost daily basis, in what many describe as a historic energy crisis for the continent. This situation is partly due to lower inventories after the cold last winter, lower exports from Russia and lower renewable energy production in Europe.

Equinor itself announced in a recent market update that the company’s marketing, midstream and processing unit would have an unusually strong result due to onshore gas prices, and the positions the company has taken in the market for so-called derivatives, to increase its exposure to gas prices in the short term.

Analysts expect adjusted operating profit of $890 million, or 7.4 billion kroner. The usual range that Equinor operates in for this division is $250 to $500 million.

Adjusted profit after tax is expected to be $2.6 billion. In this case, it’s slightly less than what Equinor reported for the first quarter of this year. But here the company incorporated gains from the sale of assets in the renewable energy sector, a practice it has been criticized for, and has now decided to walk away from, having been in dialogue with Finanstilsynet.

Without this effect, we should also go back to the first quarter of 2012 to find a higher result from Equinor.

Analysts otherwise expect production of 2.02 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, and Equinor received just over $69 a barrel for the oil it sold from Norway and internationally – except in the USA, where the price was just over $60 a barrel on average.(Terms)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases using a link that leads 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.