A multinational petroleum giant Royal Dutch Shell reported a 62% drop in third-quarter net income, saying it doesn't expect a quick recovery despite signs of improving energy demand and pricing.

Thrashing the analysts' prophecy, as compared to BP congeal increase in dividend payment from 40 cents per share to 42 cents, Shell's third-quarter net attributable income fell 62% to $3.2 billion from the same period a year ago, followed with a glide of almost 3.7 percent shares in London trading.

Under the streamlining process of reducing the operation cost by roughly a billion dollar, the company is laying off some 5,000 employees, or about 10% of its work force.

“Shell reported a bad upstream result which was offset by a good downstream performance”, said Jason Kenney, an Edinburgh-based analyst at ING Wholesale Banking NV.

In a line of a same quarter last year, a steady production of oil and gas for the quarter was at 2,926 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day.

With the future production expectations, shell is aspiring to add 1 million barrels a day to capacity by the end of 2012, instead of an average annual growth rate for oil and gas output of 2 percent to 3 percent between 2009 and 2012. It optimistically holds 55 percent of the project agreement with the second-largest producer of natural gas in the U.S, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. As stated, in July they made a discovery at the Vito exploration oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, the company is in threat with its future on a number of theoretically difficult fields, including eccentric reserves at oil-sands in Canada and deepwater projects in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil.