Trading house Sumitomo Corp. said Thursday it had withdrawn from the U.S. shale oil and gas business to cut costs and proceed with structural reforms.
The Japanese firm has sold all of its stake in a shale oil project in Texas to a U.S. oil development company due to difficulty securing profitability. The move follows a sale last year of its stake in a shale gas development project in Pennsylvania.
Sumitomo booked a loss of about ¥1 billion ($9.5 million) on the sale of the Texas stake, which it acquired in 2018, in its April-December earnings released Thursday.
"We evaluated individual projects and made our decision (to sell the stake) as part of restructuring," a senior Sumitomo official said during a press briefing.