Mexican state company Pemex Friday announced a $1.9 billion net loss for the second quarter, compared with a net profit of $1.2 billion in the same period of last year.
In a filing to the Mexico Stock Exchange, Pemex largely attributed the loss to financial reasons, including a 15.3% drop in the value of the Mexican peso against the dollar in recent months.
Sales in the quarter were $29.7 billion, a 3.2% year-on-year increase. All of the growth, however, came from domestic sales.
Exports came to $14 billion of the sales total, and were $4.4 billion lower than a year earlier as a result in the drop in international oil prices and of the volume of exports, the company said.
Crude exports in the quarter averaged 1.214 million b/d, a reduction of 125,000 b/d compared with last year's second quarter.
Production of crude in the quarter was 2.54 million b/d, a 0.7% decline. Late delivery of drilling rigs because of delays in the bidding processes caused problems with the rapidly declining Cantarell complex in the Sound of Campeche, Pemex said.
In addition to Cantarell, several other fields were declining, including those of the Grijalva Delta and the Offshore Light Crude region.
The declines were partially offset by long-awaited increases in the production of the technically complex onshore Chicontepec basin in the southern Gulf region.
Meanwhile, the production of natural gas in the second quarter fell by 4.4% year-on-year, partly because associated oilfields are declining. But in addition, drilling was postponed in some fields as a response to the low prices in US markets, Pemex noted.
