PetroVietnam continues 3 year floundering

According to a recent report published on the website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, during the period PetroVietnam exploited 12.93 million tonnes of oil. The group’s revenue was VND318 trillion ($14.28 billion), a 25.7 per cent decrease compared to the VND428.3 trillion ($19.2 billion) last year.

Oil prices dropped fast in early 2014 and since then have continued to be low. According to the group, this has “deeply affected operations as well as the group’s capacity in 2015 and the first nine months of 2016.”

“Due to the effect on the exploration operations, the group has been unable to increase the amount to be exploited in 2016 and the following years,” it said.

The group also said that it has been unable to attract as much investment as it wanted to “because of the global economic slowdown.” Also, exploring in deep waters far from the shore is more difficult and costs more than in previous sites, and the group has far less experience in this field. Moreover, complicated events in the East Sea affected the progress of the group’s projects.

PetroVietnam said that it is trying to decrease expenses in order to decrease production costs. It is soon going to open new fields and decrease downtime at all its existing ones. The RC-9 structure at the Dragon field went online in June, earlier than planned. In the last three months of the year, the group expects to start production at the Thien Ung and White Lion fields.

Earlier, PetroVietnam expected the price of crude oil in the last six months of the year to fall somewhere between $45 and $50 a barrel, and the average for the whole year to be $45 per barrel. In 2016, it targeted to exploit 25.64 million tonnes of oil and equivalents, 13 per cent less than last year’s actual result of 29.42 million tonnes.

PetroVietnam’s revenue and profit have been on a consistent decreasing trend since 2013. In 2015, the group earned VND293.44 trillion ($13.16 billion) in revenue and VND30.7 trillion ($1.38 billion) in profit.

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