Budapest-headquartered international oil & gas company MOL Group has announced its financial results for the third quarter of 2019. Despite a weaker macro environment and much lower oil and gas prices, strong Q3 EBITDA allows MOL Group to raise 2019 full year guidance to “around US$2.4bn” from US$2.3bn.

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At present, MOL Group is engaged in production activities in eight countries and exploration assets in 13 countries. MOL Group operates four refineries and two petrochemicals plants under integrated supply chain management in Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia, and owns a network of 2,000 service stations across 10 countries in central and southeastern Europe.

 

Upstream results

 

Upstream EBITDA declined to US$235m in Q3, reflecting lower oil and significantly lower gas prices. The volume of hydrocarbon production slightly decreased by one-per-cent year-on-year in Q3 and stood at 107,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), although year to date production of 112,000 boepd remains above the full-year guidance.

 

Downstream 

 

The Downstream segment’s Clean CCS EBITDA improved by four per cent to US$272m in the third quarter, as refinery margins rebounded from the H1 decrease. Motor fuel demand continued to expand by three per cent in the relevant CEE region and supported the downstream results. The momentum of construction work at the site of MOL’s single largest ever organic investment – its €1.2 billion, 200,000 tonne per annum polyol plant in Tiszaújváros, northern Hungary – continued to grow in Q3 and progresses as scheduled.

 

Consumer services

 

Consumer services reached new all-time high quarterly result of US$161m – up by 10 per cent year-on-year as both non-fuel and fuel margins expanded further, and the segment benefits from the strong regional fuel demand trends as well. MOL’s flagship Fresh Corner branded non-fuel concept rollout dynamically continues across the network, the number of reconstructed sites with Fresh Corners rose to 794 from 615 a year ago.

 

Gas Midstream segment 

 

Finally, the Gas Midstream segment reached US$27m EBITDA in Q3, eight-per-cent higher than a year ago.

 

Funding “strategic transformational projects”

 

Commenting on the results, MOL Group’s Chairman-CEO Zsolt Hernádi noted: “The strong financial delivery of our resilient, integrated business model in the first nine months allows us to upgrade our full-year 2019 Clean CCS EBITDA guidance to around US$2.4bn (from around US$2.3bn).

 

“We also continue to generate positive simplified free cash flow, thus fully funding even the nearly doubling organic investments, as we push forward with our strategic transformational projects,” he continued. “The flagship polyol plant remains on track and on schedule, with major construction site works boosted up in Q3 and overall completion now exceeding 35 per cent.”