Thursday saw the nation’s largest private firm “Reliance Industries” reporting a 13% jump in net profit on the back of good refining margins in the first quarter of current fiscal.

In April-June, the company had posted a net profit of Rs 4,110 crore, against Rs 3,630 crore a year ago.

The company earned USD 15.7 on every barrel of oil it processed from it’s refinery at Jamnagar, where it operates a 660,000 barrels per day. The USD figure earned is much higher than the Asian average of USD 8-9 barrel.

The company’s sale for the quarter rose 38% to Rs 43,050 crore. Reliance is also the nation’s largest petrochemical firm and its refining saw 46% in revenues to Rs 32,587 crore. The reason behind the growth could be attributed to the rise in price of petroleum products globally.

To add more, the company also saw outward shipments of 5.3 million tons of products contributing USD 5.7 billion in the revenues. The refinery at Jamnagar has been converted into a full fledged export house.

“At Reliance we continued to scale new peaks in financial performance despite challenging business environment including domestic inflation and weakening of the leading economies of the world,” commented the RIL's Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani on the results.

RIL’s production of petrochemical products was up by 4% to 5 million tones during the quarter ended June 30, 2008. In the same quarter of the previous fiscal, the company had production of 4.8 million tonnes of petrochemical products.