Pick a refiner, any refiner, and there’s a good chance it’s lagging the S&P 500′s 24% gain this year. HollyFrontier (HFC), for one, has lost 3.8% in 2013, while Tesoro (TSO) has gained just 7.1% and Marathon Petroleum (MPC) has advanced about 13%.
Bloomberg News Not Valero Energy (VLO). It’s gained a whopping 29% in 2013, helped by its 2% rise to $40.24 today after releasing earnings that met analyst forecasts. MarketWatch has the details:
Valero Energy reported a profit of $312 million, or 57 cents a share, compared with a profit of $674 million, or $1.21 a share, a year earlier. The year-earlier period included a noncash asset impairment loss of $341 million and severance expense of $41 million. Excluding those items, per-share earnings for the year-ago period were $1.90.
Revenue rose 4.1% to $36.14 billion.
Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were recently forecasting earnings of 41 cents a share on revenue of $29.76 billion.
Oppenheimer’s Fadel Gheit and Robert Du Boff look ahead to 2014:
Gasoline margins started weak, but distillate margins remain strong. VLO is benefiting from widening North American light sweet crude discounts to Brent, especially WTI in Mid-Continent, LLS on the GC, and sour crudes also on GC. Valero has cost advantages due to its substantial capability to process discounted crude.
Can Valero keep rewarding investors?
No comments:
Post a Comment