It's the biggest annual profit ever posted by a U.S. company -- 40.6 billion dollars.

Exxon Mobil says it chalked up that profit in 2007, with the help of historic crude oil prices at the end of the year.

Exxon Mobil is the world's biggest publicly-traded oil company.

It also set a U.S. record for the biggest quarterly profit, with net income of 11.7 billion dollars for the final three months of 2007. That topped its own previous mark of 10.71 billion from two years earlier.

The results aren't considered a surprise, given the record prices for a barrel of oil at the end of 2007. For much of the fourth quarter, they hovered around $90 a barrel. That's more than 50 percent higher than a year ago.

The company's revenue rose 30 percent in the fourth quarter to more than 116 billion dollars, from 90 billion a year ago.