By Jaime Llinares Taboada

 

Royal Dutch Shell PLC on Thursday posted a loss for the fourth quarter of the year, and its underlying performance was worse than expected.

The Anglo-Dutch oil-and-gas major booked a net loss of $4.01 billion for the three months to Dec. 31, swinging from a $489 million profit in the third quarter and a $965 million profit in the fourth quarter of 2019. The full-year loss was $21.68 billion, compared with a $15.84 billion profit in 2019.

Fourth-quarter adjusted earnings on a current cost of supplies basis came in at $393 million, down from $955 million in the third quarter and below the market consensus of $597 million, taken from Vara Research and based on 25 analysts' forecasts. The metric is a figure similar to the net income that U.S. oil companies report, but strips out exceptional items.

Shell declared a quarterly dividend of $0.1665, bringing the full-year payment to $0.653--down from $1.88 in 2019.

Net debt as at the end of the year was $75.4 billion. Shell has a target to reduce net debt to $65 billion before distributing 20%-30% of cash flow from operations to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks.

 

Write to Jaime Llinares Taboada at jaime.llinares@wsj.com; @JaimeLlinaresT

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 04, 2021 02:31 ET (07:31 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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