New man at top must ask: what is the point of Shell?

And if the focus on Shell's quarterly payouts — running at an annualised 7% and rather trouncing your building society rate — were not enough, the new fellow running the company is unlikely ever to have whistled at the results of a 3D seismic or phwoared at the potential of classic oil-bearing geological structure.

Today's results are the last full year to be overseen by Peter Voser, the 50-year-old Swiss finance director of Royal Dutch Shell.

From the summer he takes over from his boss Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive whom Shell's board has laboured long to replace.

That the board turned to the group's finance director is telling. Voser had been overlooked as a candidate by commentators who preferred to look to either fellow executive Linda Cook, whose remit includes the energy technologies that will shape the 21st century, or, radically, to an outside appointment.

Voser is so Swiss he sits on the board of the giant UBS (and where he has a front row seat on the unfolding banking crisis) and is such a finance man he has been around the world running the accountancy function of several Shell businesses and even been group chief internal auditor.

Within a decade, Shell has gone from patrican imperialist Sir Mark Moody-Stuart to the abrasive leadership (and reserves overstatement scandal) of Sir Philip Watts, to the cerebral meritocrat van der Veer and now to the numbers man Voser. Or from a geologist and a seismologist who both kicked barrels in their careers in the North Sea and Nigeria to the Dutch corporate planner and now to the accountant and admin man.

The super-spike in the price of crude means today's record annual financial results are no surprise. What is key to the Shell story, however, actually occurs in mid-March when the group reveals it latest strategic thinking.

It is a document that will have Voser's fingerprints all over it and as such may tell us little — and certainly not give us the answer to the main question: what is the point of Shell?

Have the integrated supermajors outlived their useful lives? Does it make sense for an explorer, developer and producer to be in the same company encumbered by the difficult margins downstream in the refineries and at the petrol pump? How relevant is a last-century champion of a world dominated by hydrocarbons to a new millennium where investment in the tough, dirty, and costly extraction of Canadian oilsands has to be weighed alongside betting on the right technology for this century — wind, solar, hydrogen or even nuclear?

What we do know is that Shell has previously committed to the highest capital expenditure programme of any international oil company, a reinvestment penance, if you like, for the super-profits of the last few years. We also know that Shell has not cut its dividend since the Second World War.

As of now, however, Shell is battling with downwardly massaged oil price assumptions and the perennial fight to find new reserves to even replace dwindling production growth. But Shell doesn't cut dividends; for some investors, it has simply become a giant cash machine.

So if anything gives, it will be the energy giant's $30 billion-plus a year of capital expenditure. And if that expenditure goes, it is harder for Shell to justify itself as an energy company for the 21st century or as an investment stock to grow capital.

With the number crunchers now running the shop, the time may well have come for Shell to consider whether it still wants to be Shell.