By Bloomberg News
Royal Dutch Shell Plc said third-quarter profit rose, beating estimates, as earnings from refining and natural gas offset the impact of lower crude prices at Europe’s biggest oil company.
Profit excluding one-time items and inventory changes gained 31 percent to $5.8 billion from $4.5 billion a year earlier, the Hague-based company said today in a statement. That beat the $5.48 billion average estimate of 16 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Shell appointed former Du Pont CEO Charles Holliday to succeed Jorma Ollila as chairman next year. Holliday has been a non-executive director since 2010.
“Our results today show that we are delivering on three priorities I set out at the start of 2014 — better financial performance, enhanced capital efficiency and continued strong project delivery,” Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden said in the statement.
Shell rose as much as 1.2 percent in London and traded 0.8 percent higher at 2,252.5 pence at 8:11 a.m.
Van Beurden, who became CEO this year, has prioritized selling underperforming assets and reining in costs. Shell has agreed to sell its onshore fields in Nigeria, where it lost almost $1 billion to sabotage in 2013. This week, it asked the U.S. for five more years to explore for oil off Alaska’s coast, where it halted operations in 2012 for repairs.
Oil prices have tanked since July as production from U.S. shale fields boomed and the global economy slowed. The price of Brent crude oil, a global benchmark, is down more than 20 percent since the start of this year.
BP Plc and BG Group Plc, the other two largest U.K.-listed gas producers, this week reported lower profit on oil prices.
