So, is this a good thing or a bad thing. I would say a good thing, because they pay a dividend…
So how much is too much? if it’s a publicly traded company, it’s never too much. No some people may think this is excessive, but a publically traded company has a charter, a responsibility, and is bound by law to execute in the interest of the shareholders, to make them money. ExxonMobile is apparently doing that quite well.
So let’s look at some of these figures in comparison to other industries. The CEO of EM makes less in one year than most hollywood blockbuster actors, significantly less. As fas as gasoline itself, oil has to be dug and pumped from the ground, piped to coastlines, loaded abord tankers, shipped across vast oceans, offloaded to smaller tankers, then offloaded to pipelines here in the states, pumpet to refineries, then processed and refined, then piped to local distributors, then loaded onto trucks, driven to gas stations, and then pumped into the gas station’s tanks, and finally, pumped into your car. All this and gasoline is still significantlly cheaper than say … a bottle of water.
Exxon Mobil Corporation said today that its 2005 earnings totaled $36.13 billion, an increase of 42 percent from the previous year. The amount is the largest annual profit ever for an American company.
Earnings for the final quarter of the year were $10.71 billion, or $1.71 a share, up 27 percent from the $8.42 billion, or $1.30 a share, in the final quarter of 2004.
The fourth-quarter performance capped a record year for oil companies driven by a surge in crude oil and gas prices. Crude oil prices rose 40 percent last year, driven by rapidly rising demand from economically rising countries like China and India and production problems in oil-producing countries like Nigeria and Iraq.
Total revenues for the quarter reached $99.66 billion from $83.37 in the year-ago period.
Exxon Mobil reported that oil and gas production declined by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. However, the company said that if the lingering effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which crimped production in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Gulf Coast, and other factors are included, production rose 2 percent.
Exxon Mobil Posts Largest Annual Profit for U.S. Company – New York Times
Just like in Richard Clark’s book that outlined how the oil companies were allocated exploratory sections of Iraq, there is truth to this also, that the benefciariess of the Iraq war are not the American or even the Iraqi people, but the sloth that is Lee Raymond, CEO of ExxonMobile and other executives of the oil industry.
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