Occidental revenue shock! Growth jumps to 36.6%

One loud quarter sits inside a quiet three years

Occidental Petroleum put out an 8-K attachment ahead of its third-quarter results. It is a short table of prices and volumes, not a full income statement. The last complete set of financial figures runs through 2026 Q2, so that is the period the numbers below describe.

In 2026 Q2 revenue grew 36.6% from a year earlier. That came to $7.1bn of sales. A quarter earlier the year-on-year change was still -4.2%. Against 2026 Q1 itself, sales rose 26.6%.

Now the part a headline leaves out. Stretch the view out and the excitement fades: revenue compounded at just 2.2% a year from 2023 Q2 to 2026 Q2. One loud year-on-year number is sitting inside a nearly flat three-year line.

An oil company's story is written in its spending

Occidental pulls oil out of the ground, and that takes constant spending. In 2026 Q2 capital spending was 22.5% of revenue. Depreciation, the accounting cost of wells and equipment wearing out, was 26.2% of revenue.

Put the two side by side and spending came to 0.9x depreciation in that quarter. My reading is that the company put back slightly less than it wrote down, which looks like a steady pace rather than a push to grow. The pre-earnings table gives prices and volumes only, so the third-quarter cost picture is not available here.

Cheap against peers, and lagging them in the same window

After the move, Occidental Petroleum traded at 9.8x trailing earnings. The median peer sat at 19.9x. That works out to -51.0% against the peer median, in other words a discount.

The shares also moved differently from the group. In the same window as the filing, Occidental Petroleum's cumulative return against the peer basket came to -2.0% from day 0. On the filing day itself the gap was -0.8%. Read that as a comparison, not a cause: plenty of other things trade in the same days.

A caveat on the comparison: only 3 peers have a P/E here. Exxon Mobil is left out of this comparison because its price or earnings data was not available. The peer basket used for the return comparison holds 4 names.