Oil giant PetroChina pumps lowest profit since 1999

State-owned PetroChina's net profit tumbled 66.7% year-on-year to 35.65 billion yuan in 2015, its weakest figure since 1999 AFP/Johannes Eisele

SHANGHAI: Chinese oil giant PetroChina has posted its lowest profit since 1999 with the company citing a struggling global economy and slump in international oil prices last year.

State-owned PetroChina's net profit tumbled 66.7 per cent year-on-year to 35.65 billion yuan (US$5.50 billion) in 2015, the company said in a statement filed to the Shanghai stock exchange late Wednesday (Mar 23). The profit figure was the weakest since 1999, according to Bloomberg News.

Annual revenue dropped 24.4 per cent on the year to 1.73 trillion yuan, the statement said, as benchmark crude oil prices slumped by nearly half.

"In 2015, the global economic recovery slowed down, the downward pressure on China's economy continuously intensified, the overall supply in the oil and gas market was sufficient and the international oil prices kept dropping," the statement said.

China's economy, the world's second largest, grew an annual 6.9 percent last year - the lowest in a quarter of a century - which dragged on the global recovery.

PetroChina's Shanghai-listed stock was down 1.41 per cent on Thursday afternoon.

The company plans to shut down oil and gas fields that have no hope of making profits, PetroChina chairman Wang Yilin said in Hong Kong on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg, marking its first output cut in 17 years.

In 2015, PetroChina's crude oil output - both domestic and overseas - reached 971.9 million barrels, up 2.8 per cent from 2014, according to the company.

PetroChina's parent China National Petroleum Corp. is among the government-owned enterprises Beijing is calling on to become more market-oriented to help reform the lumbering state sector.

As part of the reform drive, PetroChina sold half of a pipeline unit for US$2.4 billion to spin off non-core assets. It also announced plans to integrate assets in three pipeline subsidiaries into a single company to reduce operating costs.