Dateline 2012-04-08:
Petroliam Nasional Bhd, Malaysia’s state oil company, plans to lower its annual dividend paid to the government to RM28 billion (US$9.2 billion) this year as it holds onto cash to help reverse a production slump.
“We need to grow,” Shamsul Azhar Abbas, the group’s chief executive officer, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur on March 30. “Energy reserve is not finite, it will deplete. You can’t be sucking us dry.”
Petroliam Nasional, which manages all the Southeast Asian nation’s energy reserves, is the biggest single contributor to government revenue, having paid RM30 billion in dividends for each of the past three financial years. Shamsul, who took over as CEO in 2010, wants to retain more of the company’s profits to invest in exploration after seeing Malaysia’s oil and gas production fall for three straight years
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Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 