![]()
- White House Plans to Freeze Spending to Cut Deficit
- Week Ahead: Investors Go for Quality, Assess Recovery
- Hedge Fund Billionaire Paulson Reports New Citi Stake
- Cramer: 5 Earnings Reports to Watch Next Week
- Court Rejects 'Clawbacks' for Alleged Stanford Victims
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- Tax Credit Sparking First-Time Home Sales: Realtors
- Investors Cut Back US Stocks for Bigger Growth Abroad
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- Dollar is Not Plunging—So 'Calm Down': Market Strategist
- Strategists Say Markets Have More Upside — But How Much?
- Hirschhorn: Risk-Averse Traders
- Roginsky: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Financial Reform
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- TV Series Inks Unique Deal For Fight
- First Time Buyers Rescue Housing: Realtors
- Dollar General Trades Higher After Its IPO
- Fed Reform? Not So Fast.
MOST SHARED
- Today's Market Action
- Microsoft's Bill Gates Praises Apple's Steve Jobs For 'Saving the Company'
- Israel Going Green
- Low Interest Rate Investing
- Week Ahead: Investors Go for Quality, Assess Recovery
- Inside Wal-Mart's Acai Berry Juice Maker
- CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping America Great
- China's Role as Lender Alters Dynamics for United States
- Has Twitter's Finest Hours (Seconds) Come and Gone?
- Seeking Innovation in Health Care
Royal Dutch Shell beat all forecasts on Tuesday with a 12 percent rise in first-quarter current cost of supply (CCS) net income, helped by record oil prices which broke $100 a barrel in the period.
![]() |
AP |
Excluding non-operating items, which amounted to a net charge of $77 million, the CCS result, which strips out the impact of changes in the value of fuel inventories, was $7.85 billion.
A Reuters poll of 11 analysts gave an average forecast of $6.84 billion for Shell's first quarter CCS earnings, excluding non-operating items.
The highest forecast was $6.99 billion.
"They look like blow-away numbers. Surprising across all divisions at this time," said Jason Kenney, analyst at ING. "I can't see anything in particular that is unusual, they've just done well."
Shell and other oil companies are benefiting from surging oil prices, which topped $100 a barrel in January and have since climbed towards $120.
Earnings at Shell's rival BP also beat forecasts.
The Hague-based Shell delivered a surprise for investors with a small boost in output.
It said production averaged 3.52 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) in the first three months of the year, compared with 3.51 million boepd in the same period last year.
Analysts had predicted output would fall to 3.40 million boepd.
"The real positive is the upstream, both on the volumes and on the profitability," said Herman Bots, analyst at Theodoor Gilissen.
Strategy on Track
Shell Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer said the company's results were "competitive" and its strategy was on track.
"Shell has the largest capital spending program in our industry today, to grow the company and play our part in ensuring that energy markets remain well supplied," he said in a statement.
After five years of falling production, the world's second-largest non-government-controlled oil company by market capitalization has been struggling to expand output.
Output is in decline at some ageing fields and access to big sources of new reserves is becoming harder.
Oilfields in some of the largest reserve holders are off limits to foreign oil companies.
Refining and fuel marketing profits fell 20 percent due to an industry-wide collapse in crude processing margins, although the result was better than analysts had expected.
Shell said a refund of royalty payments helped boost profits at its oil sands division, which squeezes crude from bitumen-drenched soil in Canada, where many analysts had expected earnings to fall due to lower production.
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates spoke to Columbia students, and Buffett made the students a startling offer.
- For the chief of cable company Comcast, growth has been about making deals – generally very large deals.
- Some companies may start using insurance to shift carbon risk from their balance sheets to maybe... yours?
- The president and founder of Genesis Today wants to improve America’s health, and thinks Wal-Mart can help.
- Switzerland's privacy watchdog is taking legal action to force Google to make changes to its Street View service.
- A wealthy, distracted Texas driver crashed his million-dollar Bugatti Veyron sports car into a salt marsh, say police.













