Galp Q1 Net Profit Hits €272 Million, +41% Year-on-Year — Refining Margin Almost Triples to $14.8 a Barrel as Upstream EBITDA Climbs 78% on Brazilian Production

Galp Energia opened the Lisbon Q1 earnings season on Monday morning with the kind of report management has been signalling for weeks. Net profit reached €272 million in the first quarter of 2026 — a 41% increase on the same period of 2025 — and EBITDA climbed by the same 41% to €943 million. The number landed a touch below the €276 million consensus estimate compiled by analysts, but it cleared the EBITDA bar of €890 million by a comfortable margin. Investors backed the print: Galp shares rose 1.90% to €19.57 by midday on the PSI, helping the index to a 0.43% gain.

What drove the beat

The composition of the quarter is more interesting than the headline. Galp's upstream segment — its share of oil and gas production, mostly from Brazilian deepwater fields — delivered €685 million of EBITDA, up 78% year-on-year. Total production reached 129,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, a 23% jump on Q1 2025 and 14% above the fourth quarter of 2025. Crude oil accounted for 87% of the mix, with the rest natural gas. Galp's flagship Brazilian asset — the FPSO Bacalhau floating production unit at the Sépia field — is in ramp-up, and the company confirmed that an exploration campaign in Namibia is scheduled for the end of 2026.

The industrial and midstream business, which includes the Sines refinery and Galp's gas trading book, posted EBITDA of €198 million — down 9% on a strong comparison quarter, but propped up by an outsized refining margin. The realised margin on a barrel of Sines output averaged $14.8 over the quarter, compared with $5.6 a year earlier and an analyst consensus that had been pegged at $10–11. Brent crude touched ~$120 a barrel on 9 March at the height of the geopolitical squeeze and was trading around $101 on Monday morning.

The commercial division — service stations, B2B fuels, electricity retail — generated EBITDA of €84 million, up 37%. The renewables business, dragged by lower wind resource and pre-commissioning costs on new solar parks, swung to a small operating loss of €2 million.

What the management is signalling

Co-CEO Maria João Carioca framed the quarter around "operational resilience" and Galp's role in "securing energy supply" through a quarter that included a Middle East war scare, a regional Iberian electricity stress event around the apagão anniversary, and a sharp move in crude prices. The company kept its full-year guidance unchanged.

The strategic file Lisbon analysts care about most is the proposed combination with Spain's Moeve — the rebranded Cepsa, owned by Mubadala and CVC — which Galp first acknowledged in October 2025. Management reiterated Monday that the deal is on track for mid-2026 closure, but did not move the needle on the structure of the transaction or on what it would mean for the Sines refinery's role inside a combined Iberian downstream group.

What it means for Portugal

Galp is one of the three largest companies on the PSI by market value, the country's largest single corporate taxpayer, and the operator that keeps petrol stations stocked, jet fuel running through the country's airports, and natural gas flowing into roughly 1.4 million Portuguese homes through Galp Power. A Q1 with this much margin compression-resistance and 78% upstream growth means the company is on track to remain by far the largest contributor to corporate income tax in the country in 2026 — and gives the Finance Ministry an early indication that one of the most volatile lines in its non-tax revenue forecast (Galp's IRC) is not likely to disappoint this year.

The next box on the calendar is a heavy one. Eight of the sixteen PSI listings file Q1 accounts between 4 and 7 May, including BCP, the EDP group and CTT. Galp's print sets the bar for what "a strong quarter on the PSI" looks like in 2026.