Oil companies - zero problems Fans of very large numbers get to feast every three months on Big Oil's quarterly results. It must be like experiencing Christmas morning four times a year. The trouble with large numbers, of course, is that they obscure as much as they illuminate. Behind the billions reported by the international oil companies (IOCs) this week - Chevron joined the list on Friday, reporting third-quarter net income of $5bn - is a troubling lack of operational momentum. While capital spending continues to soar, production growth is stalling. That could be a long-term trend. Higher oil prices can offset flat or declining production, but they will not make it go away. Some of the setbacks were for operational reasons such as shutting productive wells for maintenance, or events such as accidents. The combined 2 per cent production rise reported by European majors in their third-quarter figures in the past few days was because Libya's oil has come back on stream this year. Without that, their output would have been 1 per cent lower, according to RBC Capital Markets. Oil companies are also shedding less productive assets - a smart idea, on the whole. Asia's national oil companies are not only competing more with IOCs as producers; they are also paying high prices for those assets being shed. So while one quarter's figures give only a partial view, they are part of a pattern: IOCs seem to be at a production crossroads. Sure, they still churn out cash like no other sector. ExxonMobil's $14bn of operational cash flow in the third quarter allowed it to lift capital expenditure by 7 per cent. But its earnings were still 7 per cent lower. The problem for oil producers is that global demand for oil is growing at only half the pace of the years before the global financial crisis. For the IOCs and their shareholders, all those zeros may actually be less important than they look.