By Greg Walters
Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- OAO Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, posted a 20 percent drop in third-quarter profit compared with the previous three months as crude prices fell and export tariffs rose.
Net income slid to $3.47 billion from $4.31 billion in the second quarter, the Moscow-based company said today in an e- mailed statement. That beat the median estimate of $2.68 billion from a Bloomberg survey of 10 analysts. Rosneft earned $1.93 billion in the third quarter of last year.
“Next year will be all about how companies react to a collapse in commodity prices, and the first indicator is the third-quarter results,” Artyom Konchin, an oil and gas analyst at UniCredit Aton in Moscow, said before the figures were released.
Urals crude, Russia’s export blend, rose to a record $142.50 a barrel in July before sliding 33 percent by the end of September. The average third-quarter Urals price of $113.48 a barrel was 58 percent higher than the same period last year, and 3.7 percent lower than in the second quarter.
Russia raised the oil export duty to $495.90 a metric ton on Aug. 1 from $398.10, following rising crude prices in previous months. The rate increase hurt oil companies’ earnings when price gains subsequently reversed.
State-run Rosneft grew from a second-tier oil company into Russia’s leading producer after buying up assets belonging to OAO Yukos Oil Co., which collapsed under back-tax claims of more than $30 billion. Rosneft borrowed $22 billion last year to bid for Yukos assets sold at auction.
The company began consolidating Yukos’s former production units Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz in May 2007, and agreed to sell half of Tomskneft in December to Russian oil producer OAO Gazprom Neft.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Walters in Moscow at gwalters1@bloomberg.net
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