MEXICO CITY: Mexico’s oil and gas revenues totaled 381.9 billion pesos ($23.2 billion) in the first half of 2015, down 38.3 percent from the same period of last year, the Finance and Public Credit Secretariat said Friday.
The revenue decline “reflects the drop in the price of petroleum and natural gas (47.5 percent and 33.8 percent lower, respectively), as well as a reduction in crude production (down 8.5 percent),” the secretariat said in its report on Mexico’s economy, finances and public debt in the year’s first six months.
Oil production has fallen by around 30 percent from a high of 3.38 million barrels per day in 2004 due to a sharp decline in output at offshore Cantarell, formerly Mexico’s most productive field, and a lack of investment in the country’s promising deep-water frontier.
To reverse that trend, Mexico recently carried out a historic energy overhaul that opened the sector to foreign investment for the first time since 1938.
First-half public-sector revenues rose 4 percent in real terms compared to the same period of 2014, according to the secretariat.
Non-petroleum revenues climbed 23.4 percent, highlighted by a 28.8 percent increase in the tax take, and served to offset the reduction in oil and gas revenues, the portfolio added.
It said the economy, which grew at a 2.5 percent clip in the first quarter, continued on a growth path in the first half despite a “complex and volatile” global scenario.
The budget deficit in the first half of the year amounted to 345 billion pesos ($21 billion), which the secretariat said was consistent with the level approved by Congress. EFE
