Despite record North American revenues, oil-field services giant Halliburton said a faster-than-anticipated decline in gas drilling and rising supply costs ate into its first-quarter operating margins and will likely lead to further margin "drift" through the rest of 2012. Halliburton saw its first-quarter global operating margin drop two percentage points to 20% from the prior quarter. Chief Financial Officer Mark McCollum said he expects global margins to "normalize" somewhere in the "low twenties" over the remainder of the year -- a pullback from predictions of margins in the "mid-twenties" made last quarter.
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