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WEEKLY
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| PSO wards off loss in third quarter |
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In 9 months, however, losses stand at Rs9.3bn
Thursday, April 23, 2009
By our correspondent
KARACHI: Pakistan State Oil (PSO), the largest oil marketing and state-owned company with 71.7 per cent market share, averted losses in the third quarter (Jan-March) of the current fiscal year, as it earned a profit after tax of Rs780 million.
Earlier, the first two quarters had shown a huge cumulative loss of Rs10 billion. Owing to this, for the nine months, the company posted losses of Rs9.3 billion. On year-on-year basis, the profit for the third quarter at Rs780 million is about 75 per cent lower than Rs3 billion the company earned in the corresponding period last year.
“The low quarterly profit is mainly due to the impact of high financial cost of bank borrowings obtained to finance the circular debt,” the PSO said in a handout.
“The third quarter performance of the company, however, paints a positive picture primarily due to oil price stability at the level of $50 per barrel, which once saw a peak of $141 per barrel for the OPEC crude basket in July 2008,” the company added.
The company had earned profit after tax of Rs8.5 billion in the first nine months of last fiscal year 2007-08 against Rs9.3 billion loss this year, a slump of over 109 per cent.
The cost of finance in the under review nine months period surged to Rs4.7 billion as compared to merely Rs629 million in the corresponding period in 2008, registering a massive rise of 644 per cent on yearly basis.
PSO sold 9.5 million tons of POL products, translating into a sales turnover of Rs540 billion against Rs394 billion, reporting an increase of 37 per cent on yearly basis in nine months. In the under review period, the country went through a recessionary phase during which consumption of white oil products experienced a decline of eight per cent as compared to the same period of last year.
However, the industry consumption of black oil, which is primarily used by the power sector increased by two per cent. The company also enhanced its fuel oil supplies to the power sector and consequently improved its market share from 82.9 per cent to 86.7 per cent in this product segment which is playing a pivotal role in generating electricity for the country, the company notified.
To resolve the circular debt issue about the power sector, the National Transmission and Dispatch Company, an entity of the government issued term finance certificates of Rs80.15 billion on March 31, 2009; the company extended an amount of Rs44.4 billion to settle its liabilities to the refineries.
As a result the company’s power sector receivables dropped to Rs54.4 billion which at one time reached over Rs100 billion towards the end of the quarter, the company reported.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
