Ezion Q1 profit falls 9.4% to US$41 million as falling oil prices impact business

SINGAPORE - Mainboard-listed Ezion Holdings announced on Wednesday a 9.3 per cent fall in its first-quarter profit to US$41.01 million from US$45.25 million for the year-ago period, as falling oil prices squeezed its business.

Ezion, the biggest Singapore-listed oilfield service firm by market value, also reported a 4.6 per cent drop in revenue in the three months ended March 31, 2015, to US$90.12 million.

This was largely due to the absence of contribution from the marine and offshore logistic support services division as the projects in Queensland, Australia did not go into additional trains as originally planned, Ezion said.

It added that the operating environment has been made challenging following the drastic drop in the prices of fossil fuel over the last seven months. Several of its service rigs have been made to work at their limits resulting in more wear and tear and higher maintenance. In addition, the group also needed to incur additional cost to further upgrade a few of its newer units to meet clients' additional requirements.

"The management has been putting in maximum effort to address these new challenges," Ezion said.

The company said it expects a stronger performance for the rest of the year, when some of its service rigs that have been under maintenance and inspection are redeployed before the end of June. It said several other new rigs that are undergoing modification are also expected to be progressively deployed starting from the same period.

No dividend was declared for the quarter, the same as a year ago.

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