Dallas, Texas 10/28/2013 (Financialstrend) – Whiting Petroleum Corp. (NYSE:WLL) is an $8.13 billion market capitalized oil and gas exploration company. On October 23, the company announced solid results from operations during its third quarter operations. This sent the share price of the stock on a bull run resulting in 2.84% increase in its market value during the previous week’s trading.
The oil and gas exploration company announced that it has managed to incrementally double its earnings in comparison to 2Q. It was also able to draw efficiencies into operations and manage a 12% increase in its 3Q production. In the third quarter, the company’s output was averaging around 8.53 million barrels of oil equivalents. On any given day the oil firm averaged production of 92,750 barrels of oil equivalent. Given the momentum it has built over the past quarter, the company sees it fit to up its production guidance for 4Q. It expects to increase its total production from operations during the October to December time frame to 8.8 to 9.2 million barrels of oil equivalent. It has also slightly increased its output forecast for the entire FY13 operations. The new expectation is that for the year, it might end up producing anywhere between 33.9 to 34.3 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Other highlights from the earnings call include the recording of close to $150 million as proceeds from the sale of 42000 acres of from its “Big Tex prospect area in the Delaware Basin”.
These strong 4Q expectations has convinced analysts and trade houses to up the consensus target price of the stock to $75.52 per share from its current valuation of $68.9(as of close of business on October 25). In the past one month the stock has appreciated by 15.18% and by close to 48% in the past one year. Current valuations have taken the stock very close to its 52 week high valuation of $69.20 per share.