ExxonMobil announced second quarter earnings of $4.2 billion today. You may have read that our earnings for the quarter were cut in half when compared with last year, largely because of the decline in the price of oil.

But our company is diversified and disciplined. It doesn’t rely only on the so-called Upstream, which explores for and produces oil and gas. We also have Downstream and Chemicals segments which often perform better when prices for raw materials — oil and natural gas – are lower.

Disciplined investment means that despite the ups and downs of the commodities price cycle, we are able to invest in new energy supplies that literally keep the economy running and make our modern life possible.

Each quarter, our earnings press release doesn’t just reflect how we did in the immediate past earnings period. It also provides clues about how we may do in the future by detailing some of the investments we are making.

I want to use this space to highlight a few of those:

• The roughly 4 million oil equivalent barrels per day we produced in the second quarter represent a 3.6 percent increase – about 139,000 barrels per day – over the same period one year ago.
• Crude oil and natural gas liquids production, in particular, jumped nearly 12 percent to 2.3 million barrels per day on the strength of new developments in Angola, Canada, Indonesia, and the United States.
• During the second quarter ExxonMobil made a significant oil discovery offshore Guyana after safely drilling to 17,825 feet in 5,719 feet of water and encountered 295 feet of high quality oil bearing sandstone reservoirs.
• Production at the company’s Kearl oil sands expansion project in Alberta, Canada, started ahead of schedule, doubling gross capacity to 220,000 barrels of bitumen per day. Kearl is expected to access approximately 4.6 billion barrels of resource over the next four decades.
• Meanwhile, we began production at our Cold Lake Nabiye project expansion in northeastern Alberta, Canada. The expansion is producing about 20,000 barrels per day and volumes are expected to reach peak daily production of 40,000 barrels later this year. During its expected 30-year lifespan, Nabiye is expected to provide 280 million barrels of recoverable resources.

That was all just in the second quarter.

Later this year a major project offshore Nigeria called Erha North Phase 2 is expected to start-up. And the corporation is planning to ramp up production at our Banyu Urip field in Indonesia to 200,000 barrels per day.

Beyond that we anticipate new production in the Gulf of Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Angola, Australia, and Canada in 2016 and 2017.

I mention these developments because they show ExxonMobil’s long-term business focus in action.

Much is made over whether companies like ours are meeting analysts’ short-term quarterly targets.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the most successful companies traditionally have been ones that keep their eye on the next decade or two, not just the next couple of months.