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BP posts $1.4b loss in quarter

Shares of BP closed at $39.90 Tuesday, down $1.92, or 4.59 percent.Associated Press/file photo

LONDON — BP reported a $1.4 billion loss Tuesday for the three-month period ended June 30. The main reason for the loss was $4.8 billion in write-downs on refineries, shale gas assets in the United States, and a long-delayed project in Alaska.

The earnings will do nothing to assuage the concerns of investors, who are already discontented with the performance of the century-old company and its first American chief executive, Robert W. Dudley.

“This is a very, very disappointing set of results; they missed across all fronts by a wide margin,’’ said Peter Hutton, an oil analyst at RBC Capital Markets in London.

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Stripping out the $4.8 billion in write-downs, BP’s results were still 17 percent below the consensus estimates of analysts, Hutton said.

Dudley is caught between pressure from investors who want to see an improvement in the stock price, which is still down about 30 percent from the level at the time of the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill in April 2010, and his own determination to make BP a safer, more reliable and ultimately more profitable company. Unfortunately, such a transformation requires time and weighs on performance in the short term as oil fields are shut down for extensive repair work.