we're still getting cruded..thanks Johnny
Shell makes record £12.93bn profits
2 February 2006
Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has announced record profits for a UK company of £12.93 billion.
The figure - which equates to almost £1.5 million an hour - was up nearly a third on last year, when it set a UK record with profits of 17.59 billion US dollars (£9.8bn).
It follows a year in which the cost of crude jumped from below 45 US dollars a barrel to hit a new record above 70 US dollars.
Shell made 5.4 billion US dollars (£3.04bn) in the last quarter of its financial year, against 5.22 billion US dollars (£2.94bn) in the same period last year.
The group said it expected to use some of the windfall to return up to five billion US dollars (£2.82bn) to investors through share buybacks in 2006.
The bulk of Shell's profits come from its "upstream" business - getting oil and gas out of the ground.
This division has been boosted by the spiralling cost of crude oil, which rose sharply last summer on tensions in oil-producing countries and a particularly bad hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico.
But the storms also disrupted Shell's production, shutting refineries temporarily and forcing it to spend significant sums on repairs.
Chief executive Jeroen van der Veer said: "Our good performance in the fourth quarter of 2005 gives us a solid platform to build on in 2006."