The Beach Energy Ltd (ASX: BPT) share price is wobbling in morning trade, falling almost 1% on open, then shooting higher before dropping again. At the time of writing, the Beach Energy share price is trading at $1.75, down 0.28%.
This comes after the company released its results for the first half of the 2021 financial year (H1 FY21).
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What did Beach Energy report?
In this morning's release, Beach Energy reported a net profit after tax (NPAT) of $128.7 million. That's down 53% from the first half of the 2020 financial year. The company pointed to a 40% decline in its realised oil price for the fall, saying production had remained steady at 13.0 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMboe).
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) came in at $407 million. Beach Energy noted that this was impacted by $39 million of exploration expenses, mostly around its Wherry, Ironbark and Bonaparte sites.
On 31 December, the company had $114 million of cash on hand and $290 million of undrawn loan facilities.
While its Western Flank oil production increased approximately 8% over H1 FY20, the company reported the decline rates in a number of those wells is higher than expected. It's still studying the cause for this.
Commenting on the results, Beach Energy managing director Matt Kay said:
When you take stock of what has happened in the past six months, it's extremely pleasing to see we have well and truly set the foundations for growth. It's not every day you can look back at a half and say you reached FID at an LNG project the scale of Waitsia, delivered a material liquids rich gas discovery in the Otway Basin and executed two value-accretive acquisitions.
Kay added that the half-year was the company's safest ever, with 1 million injury-free hours worked.
Looking ahead, Kay said:
Working with our joint venture participants, we continue to progress the project [Waitsia] towards first gas in the second half of calendar year 2023. Waitsia is set to supply high quality, long-life reserves to both the global LNG and west coast domestic gas markets…
Beach Energy announced will pay an interim dividend of 1 cent per share (cps), fully franked.
Beach Energy share price snapshot
The Beach Energy share price has yet to fully recover from the big hit energy shares took in the fallout of COVID-19 early last year. Over the past 12 months, Beach Energy shares are down 17%. However, they're up 86% from the 23 March 2020 lows.
Year-to-date, the Beach Energy share price is down 4%. That compares to a 3% gain on the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO).
