PetroChina Company Limited is a Chinese oil company and is the listed arm of state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation(CNPC), headquartered in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It is China's biggest oil producer.Traded in Hong Kong and New York, the mainland enterprise announced its plans to issue stock in Shanghai in November 2007, and subsequently entered trading on the Shanghai index.PetroChina was established as a joint stock company with limited liabilities under the Company Law of the People's Republic of China (the PRC) on November 5, 1999, as part of the restructuring of CNPC. In the restructuring, CNPC injected into PetroChina most of the assets and liabilities of CNPC relating to its exploration and production, refining and marketing, chemicals and natural gas businesses.Although PetroChina is the most profitable company in Asia, this success may be the result of corporate management, but can also be attributed to the near duopoly on the wholesale and retail business of oil products it shares with Sinopec in China.Because of Sinopec's link to Sudan through parent company China Petrochemical Corporation, several institutional investors such as Harvard and Yale decided, in 2005, to divest from Sinopec. Sudan divestment efforts have continued to be concentrated on PetroChina since then.Fidelity Investments, after pressure from activist groups, also announced in a filing in the US that it had sold 91 per cent of its American Depositary Receipts in PetroChina in the first quarter of 2007.At the beginning of May 2007, the company announced it had made China's largest oil find in a decade off the country's northeast coast, in an oilfield named Jidong Nanpu in Bohai Bay. In May 2008 these expectations were lowered.On November 7, 2007, Hang Seng Index Services Company announced that PetroChina would be a Hang Seng Index Constituent Stock, effective December 10, 2007. PetroChina has also come under scrutiny from international organizations for its part in trading with the Sudanese government who continues the ongoing war in Darfur.On August 19, 2009, PetroChina signed an AU$50 billion deal with ExxonMobil to purchase liquefied natural gas from the Gorgon field in Western Australia, considered the largest contract ever signed between China and Australia, which ensures China a steady supply of LNG fuel for 20 years, and also forms as China's largest supply of relatively "clean energy". This deal has been formally secured, despite relations between Australia and China being at their lowest point in years, following the Rio Tinto espionage case and the granting of visas to Rebiya Kadeer to visit Australia.PetroChina's Dushanzi District refinery became fully operational on September 24, 2009. The refinery is China's largest refinery with annual capacity of 10 million tons of oil and 1 million tons of ethylene. The refinery is an integral part of China's ambitions to import oil from Kazakhstan.February 2011: PetroChina has agreed to pay $5.4 billion for a gas field stake owned by Encana. It is the China's biggest investments in shale gas which is difficult-to-extract.
Net income $ 21.16 billion (2010)Total assets $ 250.46 billion (2010)