China's CNOOC says 3Q revenues up 69 percent

SHANGHAI, China - CNOOC Ltd., a unit of China's biggest offshore oil and gas producer, said Wednesday that its revenues soared 69 percent in the third quarter of the year, thanks to the surge in global crude oil prices.

CNOOC, the publicly traded unit of state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp., said its oil and gas output rose 15.2 percent as new projects came online.

The company's 30.9 billion yuan ($4.5 billion) in revenues for July-September were helped by an increase in the average price it earned on its products of 58.7 percent over a year earlier, CNOOC said in a written statement.

The company reported 18.3 billion yuan in revenues in the same period of 2007.

CNOOC did not provide any figures for net profit in the third quarter. Its net profit in the first half of the year rose 89 percent to a record 27.5 billion yuan.

Unlike rivals PetroChina Corp. and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec, CNOOC has very little refining business, so it is not suffering from refining losses due to domestic price controls on oil products.

But like all major Chinese resource companies, it has been stepping up investments in overseas projects to help secure future supplies.

The company's daily net output of 549,589 barrels of oil equivalent in July-September included 480,857 BOE a day from offshore China and 68,732 BOE a day from overseas, it said.

CNOOC Ltd. announced that it found four new oil and gas fields in the third quarter. Two new projects began production, it said.

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