A Profit For BP (BP) As It Turns The Corner

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Nov 2, 6:33AM EDT · Published Nov 2, 4:07AM EDT

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Less than a quarter after capping its Deepwater Horizon well leak in the Gulf, BP plc (NYSE: BP) made a profit.

The UK company said a strong operating performance helped it return to profit in the third quarter of 2010 despite an additional pre-tax charge of $7.7 billion in respect of the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Headline replacement cost profit for the third quarter was $1.8 billion, compared with a loss of $17.0 billion in the previous quarter and a profit of $5.0 billion in the third quarter of 2009.
On an underlying basis, after adjusting for non-operating items, third-quarter replacement cost profit was $5.5 billion, an increase of 18 percent versus the year-ago quarter. The additional pre-tax charge of $7.7 billion for the Gulf of Mexico spill followed a charge of $32.2 billion in the second quarter and was due principally to higher spill response costs.

The numbers were slightly below analysts’ estimates.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.