Shell Oil Company suffered losses in Q2 2020

Shell suffered a net loss of $18.1 billion during the second quarter of the year. The oil giant company attributes the losses to the coronavirus, which hit both demand for oil and prices hard. Based on its current estimated cost of inventory, the British-Dutch company made a profit of $638 million. That's a huge disappointment compared to the second quarter profits of $3.5 billion that it produced for the same period in 2019. Shell had warned that the results would not meet initial forecasts, in part because of substantial write-offs. Shell revealed on Thursday that those write-offs amounted to $16.8 billion.