Having examined the results, Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi said:
“The first quarter of 2021 has been significantly impacted by ongoing national lockdowns, however despite this Eni has achieved significantly improved results, most notably driven by E&P and the chemicals business. Meanwhile, our retail G&P business continued to grow steadily, with year-on-year EBIT increasing by 19% as we leverage our unique and expanding customer base in the power segment and benefit from a greater contribution from extra-commodity services.
The performance of R&M was largely driven by lower demand for fuels across Europe due to the pandemic, plus negative refining margins. Against the backdrop of an ongoing complex scenario, adjusted EBIT of €1.3 billion is in line with the first quarter of last year and three times higher than the fourth quarter of 2020, while net profit grew to €270 million, an almost five times increase compared to the first quarter of 2020. Across the quarter, we generated around €2 billion of organic cash flow before working capital, significantly larger than the €1.4 billion of expenditure incurred during the same period. With the pandemic situation gradually improving, and a broadening economic recovery looking more likely, we have been able to improve our outlook for the coming months, forecasting free cash flow generation in 2021 of more than €3 billion under a Brent scenario of 60 $/bbl. In this environment, we will continue implementing our decarbonization and energy transition strategy, maintaining a strong focus on the robustness of the balance sheet and targeting a competitive distribution policy to our shareholders.”
