The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation on Wednesday announced a trading deficit of N9.53bn for March 2020, which stood out as the oil firm’s first operational loss since October 2018.
Findings showed that the last time the corporation posted a deficit was in October 2018, when the corporation recorded a cumulative loss of N12.66bn.
An analysis of various monthly operational reports of the corporation obtained by our correspondent showed that in November and December 2018, the firm made trading surpluses of N2.06bn and N12.13bn respectively.
It sustained this in 2019, as it posted N15.04bn, N16.72bn, N11.72bn, N5.6bn, N6.33bn and N3.92bn surpluses in the months of January, February, March, April, May and June respectively.
For July, August, September, October, November and December 2019, the corporation made surpluses of N4.26bn, N5.2bn, N8.59bn, N13.23bn, N3.95bn and N5.28bn respectively.
The oil firm’s surpluses persisted in January and February 2020 as it recorded N1.87bn and N3.95bn respectively.
The oil firm declared that the over 300 per cent decline in March earnings was due to the huge decrease of 181 per cent in the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company’s revenue.
The NNPC said it made a total crude oil and gas export sale of $256.19m in March 2020, which decreased by 30.89 per cent, compared to the previous month’s figure.
— Punch