Oil giants Shell, TotalEnergies and BP earned about $37 billion in pre-tax profits in 2022, according to Bernstein Research, surpassing the $34 billion earned by the world’s largest energy traders for the first time. Moreover, this rapid growth in profits occurred in the most unstable period associated with the events after the start of Russia’s NWO in Ukraine.
These incredible profit figures exceed the combined income of the four largest private energy traders. Usually, until last year, everything was exactly the opposite. Resellers, as the main and integral companions of markets and trading floors, have always earned much more than pure producers who sold raw materials to them.
Shell made $16 billion in pre-tax profits from its energy trading arm, while TotalEnergies made $11.5 billion and BP $8.4 billion, according to Bernstein Research data cited by The Financial Times.
While comparing numbers between private traders and oil giants is not a completely accurate method, the general trend is that the trading arm of the oil giants is becoming increasingly important. In other words, the big players in the real sphere of production take the markets into their own hands, while last year they managed to outplay pure speculators on their own territory.
This new trend continues to gain momentum after US giant ExxonMobil announced in February that it would create its own global sales arm later this year as part of a major reorganization to boost “commercial intensity.”
It is already becoming obvious that the cloudless and profitable existence of traders for a long time was ensured by the passivity of mining and processing companies. This period is fading into the past as a whole era of permissiveness for resellers and speculators. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman promised to deal with them a little earlier, now big players with influence and power enough to put an end to the strange dominance of merchants have taken up the matter.
2023-05-04 05:29:00
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