Exxon Mobile recently revealed record gross (25%) and net (10.7%) profit margins for Q3 2022.
Q4 2020 was their lowest margins of all time at 17% gross and -12.4% net (yes negative net margin).
It's incredibly obvious that energy companies are not raising rates due to inflation but rather to price gouge consumers to make up for their lack of profit from Q4 2020 to Q3 2021.
But wait, it gets better! A metric called Free Cash Flow represents the amount of cash a business has on hand to pay dividends, interest to investors or repay creditors (or do anything else they want).
In Q4202 Exxon Mobile had -$2.6B in FCF. Today they have a positive $49.3B in FCF with $39.5B in long term debt (a $12.8B decline year over year).
So what does that mean? Exxon could pay off all of their long term debt and still have nearly $10 BILLION DOLLARS in the bank.
So just remember while nearly every human on Earth was struggling financially and emotionally during the pandemic… Exxon has been capitating from the “Blame it on inflation” excuse like every other business to achieve all time high profit margins which are currently up 46.3% since Dec 31, 2020.
When's the last time you got a 46% raise in 2 years?
But yeah “inflation” …