Petrofac – Interim results

Just a flash blog this morning as I am off to the Petrofac meeting, with so many service companies reporting this week, not to mention others, the timing of the blog will be uncertain for which, apologies.

These numbers for Petrofac were always going to be difficult for the market to assimilate and they are undoubtedly pretty poor at first glance. However, the market has also been guided down in the first half and although revenue, Ebitda, net profits and eps are bad there are some compensating factors.

Order intake in the period was large at $7.2bn and backlog is up 35% to a record $20.3bn which indeed gives good visibility for 2H 2014 and beyond. Accordingly revenue and profits for the year are weighted towards the second half and guidance remains at $580-600m. There will be questions about margins but the company say that they are ‘in line with the last few years’ and that they maintain ‘sector leading’ net margins in onshore engineering and construction.

I will report back after the meeting hopefully by blog but will tweet anything major from it, so watch this space.