Hungarian oil and gas company MOL posted an all- time high EBITDA of 3.53 billion dollars, above the updated guidance. Simplified free cash flow tripled since last year and amounted to 1.9 billion dollars, mainly driven by the favorable oil and gas prices and refinery/ petrochemical margins.
MOL’s CEO Zsolt Hernadi commented that, due to the company’s integrated business model and the good internal performance. It was able to maximize the benefits from the external environment, allowing it to fund its transformational investments. Despite the operational challenges, MOL continued its strategic transformational journey which was accelerated with the Shape Tomorrow 2030+ Strategy update one year ago. The construction of the new polyol complex proceeded according to plan and the company also took inorganic steps to strengthen its Consumer Services portfolio in Poland and Slovenia. MOL Group expects that the external environment would remain volatile and unpredictable in 2022, thus it expects its EBITDA to reach or even exceed 2.8 billion dollars this year .
Q4 EBITDA of the Upstream segment jumped by 184 % to 513 million dollars from the 2020 lows, bringing full-year Upstream EBITDA to 1.554 billion dollars, nearly half of MOL Group’s total results. The great performance was driven by the 70 % uplift of Brent oil price and the 3.5 times higher gas prices compared to last year. Simplified free cash flow significantly improved to 399 million dollars in Q4, bringing Upstream’s simplified free cash flow generation to 1.15 billion dollars in 2021. Annual oil and gas production remained above 110 million barrels of oil equivalent per day that meets the group-level target, ACG asset in Azerbaijan positively contributed to the volumes while natural decline continued mainly in Central and Eastern Europe and in the UK.
Full-year 2021 Clean CCS EBITDA in the Downstream segment doubled to nearly 1.5 billion dollars, due to the much higher refinery margins and petchem margins, of which petchem contributed over 50 %. Q4 2021 result also increased from a depressed base by 165 % to 352 million dollars year-on-year. Sales volumes grew by 3 % year-on-year in Q4, supported by higher third party sales, while regional motor fuel demand increased by 4 % in Central and Eastern Europe, MOL’s core region.
Consumer Services division achieved a 19 % full- year EBITDA growth, supported by sales volumes and non-fuel margin improvement. Fuel price cap in Hungary and Croatia, and the weakening of the local currencies against the dollar had a negative effect on the trend of continuous year-on-year EBITDA increases, thus Q4 EBITDA declined by 10 % compared to the 2020 same quarter results.
The Gas Midstream segment reached 135.6 million dollars EBITDA in 2021, 33 % lower than a year ago. In Q4, EBITDA fell by 18 %year-on year to 34 million dollars, due to sharply rising gas purchase prices and due to the fact that transmission towards Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina stopped in 2021, resulting in diminishing non- regulated transit revenues. CAPEX spending was lower as Serbian-Hungarian interconnector project was completed in Q3 2021 and was commissioned during Q4 2021.
