Conversation
... given where oil and gas prices have been this year, their profit level appears obvious. But Shell is also a massive company valued at $208 billion today. So their scale helps bump up those numbers. Shell also has a track record of posting massive profits...
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Between 2000 and 2009, Shell had the largest annual profits among European companies. But from 2010 until 2013, Russia's state-owned Gazprom overtook the London-listed giant.
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Between 2015 and 2020, Shell, Gazprom, HSBC, BAT, and Investor AB (a Swedish investment firm) took turns to be at the top of the list of most profitable companies in Europe.
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I've used pre-tax profit as a fair measure of the profitability of companies, as opposed to Shell's preferred $40~ billion 'adjusted earnings', to compare companies across countries and sectors. CNBC's has written the full analysis here:
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The company last month said it expects to pay $2 billion in EXTRA taxes in the EU and UK for the last quarter of 2022. Although I'm told: "it is the first year since 2017 it has had to pay tax" in the UK.
