Company revising plan

 THE National Petroleum Company PNG (NPCP) says it will be revising its annual plan for this year due to drop in the global oil prices.

Chairman Frank Kramer told the National Government that its next dividend payment may not be equivalent or more than K415 million recently delivered to the state.

“It’s (this year’s dividend) obviously subject to market conditions. Given the decline in oil prices we want to be very clear in advising the government that the expectation should not be that there will be a similar, certainly not larger dividend at the end of this year.

“But it will be very much a function of the market and how the performance of the company shapes up by the end of the year,” Kramer said. 

The dividend announced last Friday was described as “special” as it was not planned for by the company in its 2014 annual plan. 

The early dividend resulted from early completion of PNG LNG project. 

“We did not plan to repay any dividend to state in 2014. 

“We did not expect any revenues until December or even January 2015 but we had condensate exported in April and LNG in May so we had seven months advance in exports. 

“We had to revise our new plan so we worked through holiday periods to come up with the dividend because it was unplanned revenue,” Sonk said. 

Finance acting secretary Dr Ken Ngangan, on behalf of state, thanked NPCP board and management, and ExxonMobil for early completion of the project.

Ngangan said the dividend was a great help for government in offsetting some of its expenditure from last year. He said there was no outstanding from last year’s expenditure brought forward to this year.