Unocal Readies More Cutbacks as Profits Fall : Energy: The company announces a first-quarter slide in earnings and says $900 million more in assets and personnel will be pared.

Hit by another steep drop in earnings--and convinced that energy prices will remain flat indefinitely--Unocal Chairman and Chief Executive Richard J. Stegemeier announced $900 million more in asset and personnel cuts Monday at the firm’s annual shareholders’ meeting.

While Stegemeier said that specifics have yet to be decided, as much as $100 million of the cuts could come from employment reductions--most of them in Unocal’s domestic operations, including its Los Angeles headquarters.

The Los Angeles-based company posted net earnings for the first quarter of $16 million, or 7 cents a share--down from $75 million, or 32 cents a share, a year earlier.

“If 1991 was the pits” for U.S. oil companies, Stegemeier told stockholders, “1992 doesn’t look much better.”

Separately on Monday, Los Angeles-based Atlantic Richfield Co. also announced a precipitous first-quarter earnings decline.

Arco reported net income of $180 million, or $1.12 a share, for the quarter, compared to $351 million, or $2.17 a share, in its 1991 first quarter.

At Unocal, executives have been meeting over the last six weeks to arrive at “specific numerical goals” for the cutbacks, Stegemeier told reporters Monday. The oil company will sell at least $700 million in assets; reductions in operating costs and personnel will account for another $200 million in cuts.

Though he described staffing as “already pretty, pretty lean,” Stegemeier said the further personnel cuts will come “across the board . . . and very quickly”--by the end of 1992. Whether they will involve retirement incentives, other inducements or layoffs has not yet been decided.

As for asset sales, Stegemeier said that no units will be considered immune to scrutiny and that even moderately profitable divisions could be considered for sale. Unocal hopes to shed these interests over the next two years.

The company for several years has been trimming non-core and under-performing units as it labors under the weight of debt from a successful 1985 fight against a takeover attempt led by investor T. Boone Pickens. Since then, employment has dropped to 17,000 from 22,000 worldwide.

Lately, the company has been hard hit by low gas and oil prices and either has shed or shut down operations ranging from its Colorado shale oil project to a New Mexico molybdenum mine. Stegemeier said he expects to complete negotiations within the next few months to sell Unocal’s national truck stop network and its southeastern U.S. distribution terminals.

In the near future, Unocal will concentrate efforts on its lucrative crude oil, gas and geothermal exploration and production operations--in particular searching for a big discovery overseas that could have a “relatively dramatic impact” on the firm’s market value.

“Most of the major oil companies have announced that they’re skewing their spending to the international markets,” noted Andrea M. Esposito, an oil and gas analyst with Standard & Poor’s, “because they think there’s more opportunity there to make larger finds.”