Houston’s biggest firms saw revenue grow dramatically last year after a dismal 2020
“Oil prices are way up. As the global economy reopened from the pandemic, demand recovered much more robustly than supply.” Jesse Thompson, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ Houston branch
The reopening of the global economy and resurgent oil prices left most of Houston’s biggest companies flush with cash in 2021, after a belt-tightening 2020.
The city’s 100 biggest public companies brought in more than $1.1 trillion in revenue in 2021, according to data collected for the Chronicle 100 by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Exxon Mobil leads the list, accounting for roughly a quarter of that total, with revenues of $277 billion last year, up 54.9 percent from 2020. The oil and gas giant makes its first appearance on the Chronicle 100 this year, as it moves its headquarters from Irving, a suburb of Dallas, to the Houston area.
Other oil and gas companies saw similarly dramatic revenue growth last year, which followed a generally dismal 2020.
Phillips 66, now the secondlargest company headquartered in the Houston area, had revenues of $111.5 billion, up 73.8 percent from 2020. In 2020, the refiner’s revenues fell 40 percent to $64 billion as pandemic restrictions curtailed travel and fuel consumption.
ConocoPhillips, the independent oil company, similarly rebounded. In 2020, it generated revenues of $18.8 billion; in 2021, revenues leapt to $45.8 billion, a 144 percent increase.
“Revenue growth is pretty straightforward, right? Oil prices are way up,” said Jesse Thompson, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s Houston branch. “As the global economy reopened from the pandemic, demand recovered much more robustly than supply.”
The result: Oil prices averaged $70.68 a barrel in 2021, up nearly 70 percent from $41.96 in 2020, according to the Energy Department.
The pandemic has left its mark on this list in other ways, too. Sysco, now the third-largest