Oil multinationals from BP to Shell achieved a profit of USD 195 billion in 2022 – about the same as the total economic output of Hungary. 134 billion of that is considered “excess profit”, and the companies keep prices high at the pump. Additional taxes such as in Austria affect only a minimal part of the company.
Motorists and companies groaned last year under the high fuel prices, but for the oil companies things went smoothly: according to their most recent balance sheets, the five largest Western multinationals alone earned a record total of $ 195 billion!
This feeds the demand to skim off unjustified “excess profits”. The British organization Global Witness did this, note: it used the average value of the profit from 2018 to 2021 and added a surcharge of 20% as a “buffer”. Result: the five multinationals together made no less than 134 billion dollars in excess profit. For example, the American giant ExxonMobil suddenly earned about $ 55 billion instead of an average of ten (see graph). The oil industry benefited from several factors.
The good global economy pushed demand for oil and gas to an unexpectedly high level, and deliveries from Russia were also lacking in Europe due to the war in Ukraine. At the same time, the fall in the oil price in 2020 caused companies to invest little in production and to close even more expensive drilling sites. At that time, the industry even made billions in losses.
As a result, they have recently slowed down in expanding their production and prefer to pay high dividends to their owners. According to experts, this will not change for the time being, so we will probably continue to “burn” at the pump.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
