Chevron stock sinks on slight Q4 profit miss, refining losses
- CVX stock shot more than 4% lower on Friday following Q4 earnings.
- The oil major bested Wall Street on Q4 revenue prediction but missed on EPS.
- Chevron raised its quarterly dividend from $1.63 to $1.71.
- Chevron repurchased $15 billion of its own shares in 2024.
At the end of a volatile trading week, Chevron (CVX) is the worst performing Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stock on Friday after missing its earnings consensus slightly on the bottom line.
The oil major announced Q4 adjusted earnings per share of $2.06, which missed the average Wall Street estimate by 5 cents. CVX stock sold off more than 4.5% in the late afternoon session.
After outperforming the NASDAQ for the most part earlier in the week, the DJIA sank by half a percentage point late in afternoon trading, while the NASDAQ gave up its 1.3% early gain.
Chevron earnings news
Chevron blew revenue expectations out of the water in the fourth quarter, but this didn’t translate cleanly to profits. Sales of $52.23 billion overpowered consensus by $3.82 billion, rising 11% on an annual basis.
Losses in its refining operations, however, are what did it in. The downstream side of the business lost $248 million, largely due to lower margins in its refined products business. A year ago, the same segment saw $1.15 billion in profits.
Global production was roughly flat YoY at 3.35M bbl/day in the fourth quarter. Management expects to see 6% annual growth in production over the next two years.
For the full year in 2024, Chevron repurchased about 5% of shares outstanding for a little over $15 billion. It also spent about $12 billion on dividends.
Management said in its slideshow that upward of $2 billion in cost reductions in each of 2025 and 2026 could lead to an additional $10 billion in added free cash flow by the end of 2026.
Chevron stock forecast
Chevron stock has been going nowhere for quite a while. Overall, its been trending lower since 2022, and that pattern appears to be continuing on Friday.
Support has been largely horizontal in the $136 to $142.50 range since last August. The topline band of resistance currently sits in the high $150s or low $160s.
Traders will likely start by up the shares if they reach $141 or thereabouts. Chevron might be a boring business at this juncture, but it spending about 10% of its market cap on buybacks and dividends annually means there's reason to take a second look.
CVX daily stock chart
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Author
Clay Webster
FXStreet
Clay Webster grew up in the US outside Buffalo, New York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He began investing after college following the 2008 financial crisis.
