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Chevron (NYSE:CVX) +0.8% pre-market Friday after beating Q4 adjusted earnings expectations and raising its dividend, setting a company record for quarterly oil and gas production.
Q4 net income fell to $2.3B, or $1.22/share, from $6.4B, or $3.33/share, in the year-earlier quarter, and revenues slid 16.4% Y/Y to $47.18B, well below Wall Street consensus.
Q4 net income included $1.8B of U.S. upstream impairment charges, largely to assets in California, and $1.9B of decommissioning obligations from previously sold assets in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.
Q4 upstream earnings fell to $1.5B from $5.76B and downstream earnings fell to $1.15B from $1.68B in the year-ago quarter; cash flow from operations rose to $12.4B from $9.7B.
Despite a nearly 40% drop in annual profit, Chevron (CVX) said it will raise its dividend by 8%; the company returned a record $26.3B last year to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.
Chevron (CVX) said it set a new quarterly production record in Q4 of 1.6M boe/day, up 34% Y/Y.
For the full year, worldwide production rose 4% to more than 3.1M boe/day, with U.S. production jumping 14%, primarily due to the acquisition of PDC Energy and growth in the Permian Basin, which was up 10% over 2022.
The company’s acquisitions and higher investments in the U.S. lifted full-year capital spending up by a third to $15.8B, including ~$450M into PDC Energy assets, which added 266K boe/day of oil and gas production in the quarter.
“In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history,” CEO Mike Wirth said.