Larger companies so far are holding fast.
“The dividend remains our top priority for capital allocation,” ConocoPhillips Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Lance said today in a conference call with investors today.
Shell plans to pay a first-quarter dividend of 47 cents a share, unchanged from the previous two quarters, the Hague-based company said in a statement today. The company, which plans to defer or cancel about 40 projects worldwide, will cut spending by $15 billion over three years to make it possible to keep paying shareholders, bringing total cuts announced today for all three companies to $20 billion.
“The dividend is an iconic item at Shell and I will do everything to protect it,” Van Beurden said.
Missing Estimates
Profit excluding one-time items and inventory changes was $3.3 billion in the quarter, up from $2.9 billion a year earlier, Shell said today. That missed the $4.1 billion average of 13 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Shell’s American depositary receipts dropped 3 percent to $62.22 at 2:41 a.m. in New York.
“Shell widely missed expectations in upstream, particularly in the Americas, but performed well in downstream - - a key cushion for integrated oil companies in a declining crude price environment,” said Kim Fustier, an analyst at Edison Investment Research. Shell missing expectations by about 20 percent “doesn’t bode well for competitors.”
Occidental swung to a loss of $3.41 billion after the company wrote down the value of oil and gas fields it won’t drill until energy prices rise enough to make them profitable. Houston-based Occidental announced $2.9 billion in spending cuts.
ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. energy producer, said it lost $39 million and announced $2 billion in additional spending cuts. The Houston-based company will spend $11.5 billion drilling wells from Colorado to Indonesia, a decline of almost a third from last year. Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest oil company by market value, reports earnings on Monday.