LONDON (Alliance News) - RusPetro PLC on Thursday said its pretax loss widened significantly in 2014, hit by declining revenue due to lower production and weaker oil prices and by foreign exchange losses on loans to its Russian subsidiaries.
RusPetro said its pretax loss for the year was USD263.4 million, compared to a USD74.2 million loss in 2013. Revenue fell to USD55.1 million in 2014 from USD79.8 million, primarily due to a 26% fall in liquids production and a 9% fall in its realised oil price.
But the loss was mainly driven by foreign exchange losses booked on US-dollar denominated loans to its Russian subsidiaries. Stripping out the foreign exchange losses, the pretax loss would have been only USD60.5 million.
Oil production in the year average 3,523 barrels of oil per day, down 14% year-on-year, due to the suspension of gas and condensate production at the Palyanovo field.
"Despite the challenging business environment 2014 has been a year of important progress for Ruspetro. We have successfully introduced a new approach to fracturing our new generation horizontal wells. We have also introduced other key technologies to extract maximum insight into the subsurface, and hence de-risk our development programme in the future," said Chief Executive John Conlin.
Shares in RusPetro were down 1.1% to 11.50 pence on Thursday.
By Sam Unsted; samunsted@alliancenews.com; @SamUAtAlliance
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