LONDON -- The newest measure of the oil industry's falling fortunes arrived Tuesday in the form of a $3.3 billion, fourth-quarter loss reported by BP.
For all of 2015, BP said it lost $6.48 billion, compared with a profit of $3.78 billion in 2014 -- before plummeting oil prices began taking their full toll.
BP said it will trim about 3,000 workers from its marketing and refining business by the end of 2017. The company also repeated a commitment it made last month to cut 4,000 jobs this year in its exploration and production unit, which lost $728 million in the quarter.
Before those cuts, BP reported a global workforce of about 80,000.
The stock of the British company plunged on the news, down more than 8 percent in London trading. Petroleum futures were off by about 4 percent.
The oil industry is reeling from the effects of a global glut of oil and weakened demand amid slower international economic growth. Longer term, there are questions about the value of oil still under the ground and the seafloor, as climate concerns prompt energy users of all sizes to seek alternatives to fossil fuels.
For big oil companies, the reduced prices translate directly into lower revenue and profitability, particularly in the units of big oil companies that find crude and produce petroleum.
Exxon Mobil, the industry's largest player, reported a 58 percent decline in its quarterly profit but beat analyst estimates.
Despite oil's price per barrel being in the low $30s, down from levels above $65 as recently as May, Exxon Mobil posted a profit for the quarter. But for the year, profits at the company in 2015 were half what they were in the previous year.
BP said Tuesday in response to plunging prices that it wrote down the value of its oil and gas assets by $1.6 billion in the quarter.
Hoping to keep more investors from fleeing, BP said that despite its financial losses it would keep its dividend unchanged at 10 cents per share.
"All of this underpins our commitment to sustaining our dividend," the company's chief executive, Robert W. Dudley, said in a news release.
BP has sought to streamline its operations by selling some businesses -- a strategy in some ways forced by its need to raise money to help pay damages from its oil-well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The company took a charge of $443 million in 2015 for that spill, raising total provisions for that disaster to $55.5 billion.
Since 2010, the company has raised about $60 billion through sales of assets, including stakes in three large Gulf of Mexico oil fields in 2012 and a Texas refinery in 2013.
Most of those sales were made when oil prices were much higher than today. Other companies, needing to scale back and increase efficiency in response to plunging oil prices, are finding it hard to find buyers for businesses or operations they might want to sell.
The U.S. oil giant Chevron, for example, cited that problem last week when it reported its first quarterly loss since 2002.
"It is a terrible market to be trying to sell most assets out there," John Watson, the chairman and chief executive of Chevron, said Friday during a conference call with analysts.
Chevron lost $588 million in the last quarter of 2015, compared with a $3.5 billion profit in the period a year earlier.
In a management move announced Monday, BP promoted Lamar McKay, the head of exploration and production, to deputy chief executive. Like BP's chief executive, Dudley, McKay is an American who went to the company when BP acquired Amoco in 1998.
Information for this article was contributed by Clifford Krauss of The New York Times.
A Section on 02/03/2016