A low oil price and bad weather in the Gulf of Mexico combined to form a deadly cocktail for oil giant BP as the company said on Tuesday that its net income had dropped by nearly 40%.

Underlying replacement cost profit, the term BP uses for net income, fell to $2.3 billion in the third quarter of the year, 40% below last year's comparable figure.

The dramatic drop was still considerably better for the company than analysts had been predicting, as the company's refineries outperformed.

A consensus of analyst estimates, compiled by BP, estimated that the figure would be $1.7 billion (£1.3 billion).

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Bob Dudley, outgoing chief executive, said: "BP delivered strong operating cash flow and underlying earnings in a quarter that saw lower oil and gas prices and significant hurricane impacts."

It will likely be the last third quarter results presented by the American, who has announced that he will be stepping down next year.

He is set to be replaced by Bernard Looney, the Irishman currently in charge of upstream, the BP arm which explores and produces new oil and gas.

It has been a quarter of change, with the business making big inroads into a $10 billion (£7.8 billion) programme to sell off assets.

In August, BP said it had reached a deal that will see Hilcorp take over all its oil fields and operations in Alaska, a $7.2 billion deal (£56 billion).

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The sale also had a sting in the tail as the company was forced to write off $2.6 billion (£2 billion) because of tax charges, swinging BP to a $749 million (£583 million) loss for the quarter.

Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, said: "Today's third quarter numbers weren't expected to come in close to the levels seen in second quarter given the decline in oil prices seen since then, however they still show a company that is nimbler and more efficient than it was a decade ago."

The oil major also entered troubled waters as the impact of Hurricane Barry, which ripped through the Gulf of Mexico in July, shutting down oil fields, helped push down oil and gas production by 2.5%.

Production is expected to increase in the fourth quarter from the period before as the company completes maintenance on its sites.

Google's parent company reported a revenue increase of 20% as the technology giant hailed its "strong growth" in its latest financial results.

Alphabet said revenue for the last quarter was $40.5 billion (£31.5 billion), up from $33.7 billion (£26.2 billion) this time last year.

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As usual, the Google arm of Alphabet generated the vast majority of the firm's revenue - including $33.9 billion (£26.4 billion) in advertising revenue.

However, net income fell compared to the same quarter a year ago - from 9.2 billion (£7.1 billion) to just over seven billion dollars (£5.4 billion) and falling short of analyst expectations.

Sundar Pichai, Google chief executive, said: "I am extremely pleased with the progress we made across the board in the third quarter, from our recent advancements in search and quantum computing to our strong revenue growth driven by mobile search, YouTube and Cloud."

Annual how price growth continued to barely move in October, growing at less than 1% for the 11th month in a row, according to new data.

The closely-followed Nationwide house price index found that the average price of a home is now £215,368 with growth of just 0.2% compared with September. On a year-on-year basis the growth was just 0.4%.

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The building society said high employment and low borrowing costs are offsetting a bigger slowdown, with more than 95% of borrowers opting for fixed rate mortgages in recent quarters, around half of which have opted to fix for five years.

Robert Gardner, Nationwide's chief economist, said: "Average prices rose by around £800 over the last 12 months, a significant slowing compared with recent years - for example, in the same period to October 2016, prices increased by £9,100.

"Indicators of UK economic activity have been fairly volatile in recent quarters, but the underlying pace of growth appears to have slowed as a result of weaker global growth and an intensifying of Brexit uncertainty."