Oil and gas facility service provider Petrofac saw its FTSE-100 listed shares touch a record high of £14.28 yesterday after it posted a strong set of interim results.
Revenue for the six months to June 30 was up 34% on a year earlier, pre-tax profits more than doubled and net profits were up 128%.
Chief executive Ayman Asfari said: “We have achieved an order intake of around £1.28billion in the year to date, which together with our healthy prospects list gives us confidence that we will grow our backlog over the calendar year.
“Furthermore, we believe our strong operational performance will enable us to maintain our historical sector-leading net margins in engineering and construction over the medium term.
“Given our strong start to the year, we expect to deliver like-for-like net profits growth for the full year, excluding the gain on the EnQuest demerger, of around 20%.”
Petrofac completed the demerger in April of its UK North Sea assets to new oil and gas operator EnQuest, which also took over the UK offshore assets of Sweden’s Lundin Petroleum and listed in London. The book gain for Petrofac was £80.5million.
EnQuest has its operational headquarters in Aberdeen, where it employs about 200. Including contractors it has a UK North Sea payroll of almost 1,000.
Mr Asfari said: “Petrofac keeps continuing to grow, and while the challenges get bigger we are confident we can continue to deliver.
“We are growing strongly in the North Sea, where our headcount was up 10% to 4,400 in the six months, and we are investing in people and systems for growth in the North Sea.”
Petrofac has about 12,500 employees and operates principally out of Aberdeen, Sharjah, Woking, Chennai, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi. It has a further 19 offices worldwide.
Analysts at Evolution Securities said Petrofac continued to deliver both in revenue growth and margin and remained a quality business in oil and gas engineering and construction, especially in the Middle East and north Africa region, adding: “Our only caution is that it is difficult to see where the positive surprises will come from next.”
Petrofac also said it had an order backlog of £4.42billion at June 30, boosted by £705million of awards since then. It posted revenue for the period of £1.36billion, pre-tax profits of £249million, and net profits of £212.75million and its shares settled at £14.10, up 3.5%, valuing the company at more than £4.87billion.
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