Horacio Marín's four-pillar plan has produced its clearest financial proof: three of the pillars now generate cash, and the fourth has yet to reach YPF's balance sheet.
The starting point is worth keeping at hand. In 2023, the last year before the plan, YPF, Argentina's state-controlled oil and gas company, closed with a loss of $1,277 million. In March 2024 it presented a strategic plan built on four pillars now fixed in investors' minds: capital focus on Vaca Muerta, active portfolio management, efficiency gains across upstream and downstream, and the Argentina LNG project. The second-quarter result allows each one to be measured against a concrete number.
What the quarter cannot yet settle is the fourth pillar. Argentina LNG and the export infrastructure behind it remain capital outflows, and what they eventually contribute depends on start-up timing, financing and export windows that the current numbers do not resolve.
1. Shale Has Covered 85% of the Year-End Target
Shale oil production averaged 213,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) in April-June, 47% above a year earlier. The company set 250,000 bbl/d as its target for the end of 2026 and reaffirmed it in the same release, leaving 85% of the ground covered with two quarters still to run.
The trajectory matters more than the snapshot. In April-June 2024, YPF's shale output averaged 113,400 bbl/d, a figure derived from the company's own reporting. A year later it was 145,100 bbl/d. In January-March of this year, 205,400 bbl/d. Now, 213,000 bbl/d. Production has multiplied 1.88 times in two years, with quarterly growth moderating because the investment calendar concentrates the acceleration in the second half.
The decisive measure is what share of the company's own barrel turned unconventional. In April-June 2024, shale accounted for 46% of the oil YPF produced; a year later, 59%. That shift explains why shale growth did not translate into a jump in total output: each new Vaca Muerta barrel came in as an old barrel left a mature field. The plan never promised more production. It promised better production.
2. EBITDA Doubled Without Price Taking the Credit
April-June 2024 left adjusted EBITDA of $1,204 million, with YPF crude selling at $67.9 per barrel. The same quarter of 2025 left $1,124 million, with the barrel at $59.5. This year the result was $2,804 million, which the company describes as the highest in its history.
The comparison that settles the question is against 2024, because that quarter had a high realization price and still delivered less than half. From a similar price starting point, EBITDA in 2026 came in 133% higher. The difference was made by the structure of the business, which is what a strategic plan sets out to change and what usually takes years to show.
The contrast with last year gives a sense of the distance travelled. In 2025 the company reported quarterly net results of minus $10 million, plus $58 million, minus $198 million and minus $649 million: three of four quarters in the red, at the most expensive point of the transformation, when mature fields still weighed on the accounts and Vaca Muerta investment had yet to pay off. The half-year total closes the argument: between January and June, adjusted EBITDA adds up to $4,398 million, 88% of everything the company generated in all of 2025.
3. The Margin Went From a Quarter of Revenue to Nearly Half
The EBITDA margin on revenue was 24.4% in the second quarter of 2024 and 24.2% in the same period of 2025. Two years without moving. The release puts this quarter's figure at 43% and presents it as the best reading in twenty years.
Quarterly revenue reached $6,574 million, 42% above a year earlier, against $4,935 million in 2024 and $4,641 million in 2025. Revenue grew by roughly a third while EBITDA more than doubled, and that gap between the two is the margin. In January-March it had already risen to 32%. In three months it advanced eleven points more.
For an oil company, the margin is the indicator that survives the cycle. International prices rise and fall with nothing the company can do about it, but the share of every sales dollar that reaches EBITDA depends on its own decisions: which fields are operated, at what cost, and how much crude is refined in-house.
4. Lifting Costs Fell Almost 30% in a Year
In April-June 2025, producing a barrel of oil equivalent cost YPF $12.3. By January-March of this year the figure had fallen to $8.8, down 28%, a level already reached in the third quarter of 2025.
The mechanism is twofold and worth separating out. Part of the decline comes from the operating efficiency the third pillar targets, through process standardization and faster drilling. The other part comes from the arithmetic of the mix: every mature field that leaves the portfolio takes a high per-barrel cost with it, and what remains averages better without anyone doing anything different at the well.
The consequence is measured in resilience rather than immediate profitability. Lifting costs define the price at which a company stops making money: at $12.3 per barrel of oil equivalent, a sharp Brent correction forced a review of the investment plan; at $8.8, the same scenario leaves room to keep drilling. The second-quarter release records a further reduction without publishing the figure, which will come with the full report. Without that move, the 43% margin does not exist.
5. Portfolio Rotation Now Shows Up in the Regulatory Filings
The second pillar is about shedding non-core assets, mature fields among them. That statement has a physical translation, and it can be read in the Chapter IV filings submitted to Argentina's Secretariat of Energy.
The oil production YPF operates fell from 382,904 to 362,819 bbl/d between the first and second quarters, down 5.2%, and the entire decline came from conventional wells, which retreated 31.6%. Unconventional output was flat. The figure corresponds to gross operated production, the total of each block as declared by its operator, and is not equivalent to the net production in the company's release.
The month that shows the break is May. The company had been declaring around 59,000 bbl/d of conventional output between January and April, with a stable inventory of almost 13,000 wells. In May the volume fell to 31,633 bbl/d and the count to 9,746 wells: more than three thousand wells out of the inventory in thirty days, the handover of an entire field. Unconventional wells, meanwhile, rose month on month, from 2,274 in January to 2,384 in June. Once the sales agreed in August close, 95% of the company's production will sit in Vaca Muerta.
6. The Portfolio Is Clearing at Good Prices
Shedding assets counts for little if the market pays badly. In five days of August, YPF agreed divestments worth $1,185 million: $205 million and $200 million for two clusters of conventional blocks in Mendoza and La Pampa, and $780 million for its stakes in MetroGAS, Argentina's largest gas distributor, and its marketing arm MetroENERGÍA, an offer from power distributor Edenor accepted at the same board meeting that approved the results.
The Metrogas price is the fine detail. The process had been working with a valuation close to $800 million for the distributor as a whole, a figure that for the control package corresponded to some $560 million. The $780 million agreed came in 39% above that. More than that, once the amount was known, it implied a 50% premium to Metrogas's share price in the last trading session before the announcement. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals.
The second half of the pillar is less glamorous and harder: collecting. The Manantiales Behr process, awarded at $575 million, collapsed when the buyer failed to secure financing, and the field was eventually transferred to Pecom for $410 million. That was a $165 million gap between the price announced and the price received. It is why the Metrogas release lists completion guarantees among the closing conditions, alongside regulatory authorizations. None of the three August transactions enters the financial statements to June 30: all of them will show in the third quarter.
7. Free Cash Flow Changed Sign
April-June 2024 closed with negative free cash flow of $257 million. The same quarter of 2025, negative by $365 million. This year it was positive by $824 million, and the company puts it at $1,000 million excluding the payment for the Vaca Muerta assets previously held by Equinor, the Norwegian energy major. Adding the first quarter, which left $871 million, the half-year accumulates $1,695 million of free cash.
What stands out is that the turn did not come from cutting. Quarterly investment rose to $1,340 million, 16% more than a year earlier, with 77% directed to unconventional activity, and the company has already flagged that the bulk of the year falls in the second half.
That is the point at which a transformation plan stops being a promise. While cash flow is negative, every quarter depends on someone financing the difference, whether the debt market or asset sales. When the flow turns without drilling slowing down, the company begins funding its own growth, and divestments stop being a cash requirement and become a portfolio decision.
8. Leverage Dropped to Its Lowest Level in Eleven Years
The net debt to EBITDA ratio was 1.7 times in the second quarter of 2024, 1.9 in the same period of 2025, 1.57 at the March close and 1.09 times now. The company describes it as the lowest in eleven years.
The number is worth taking apart. Applied to adjusted EBITDA of $7,038 million over the last twelve months, net debt stands at $7,654 million, against $8,425 million in March and $8,833 million a year earlier. The improvement arrived from both sides at once: the numerator fell by around $750 million in the quarter and the denominator rose sharply.
There was also active liability management, with a $750 million prepayment that cut short-term debt to 15.7% of the total. The company therefore reaches the heaviest investment stage of the plan with its cash position in order and closing liquidity of $2,474 million.
9. Downstream Turned the Company's Own Barrel Into Margin
Refineries processed 351,000 bbl/d at 104% utilization, against an annual average of 320,000 bbl/d during 2025 and 301,400 bbl/d at 89% utilization in April-June last year. Market share stood at 59% and gasoline and diesel sales grew 10% by volume.
Utilization above 100% means the plants are running beyond their nominal design capacity, something achieved by removing bottlenecks and shortening scheduled turnarounds rather than by expanding facilities. It is precision refining, and it is expensive to achieve.
The segment had been carrying the company while upstream was rebuilt: in 2025, according to the company, operating income from midstream and downstream came to $1,167 million against $410 million from upstream. Now both ends push together. Shale24 had already reported the half-year refining record ahead of the results. The company also said it applied a temporary buffer scheme on gasoline and diesel prices and absorbed part of the international increase: the quarter's margin was achieved without passing the full rise through at the pump.
10. The Fourth Pillar Is Still on the Spending Side
Argentina LNG contributes no revenue, and neither does the pipeline that will enable large-scale crude exports. The Vaca Muerta Oil Sur pipeline (VMOS) reached the end of June with more than 77% of construction executed, against 62% in March, and starts operations around the turn of the year. YPF holds 24.49% of the project's equity, according to its 20-F filing. In May the company filed the Loma La Lata Oil project (LLL Oil) under Argentina's Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI), with declared investment of $25 billion, the largest the regime has received to date.
All of that is still construction. The quarter Horacio Marín presented on Monday was built on three pillars: shale producing, the portfolio rotating and efficiency compressing costs, with most of the targets met ahead of the deadline he set himself. The fourth, the one YPF itself has defined as the largest in scale, remains on the spending side and will stay there until crude begins to leave through Río Negro and its liquefied gas finds its window.