Is OPEC winning its price war with U.S. shale-oil producers? U.S. production has started to slow, but the number of rigs drilling for crude oil has ticked up in recent weeks, ending months of steep declines, just as oil futures took another hit.

What gives?

Data through Aug. 7, 2015

“The recent increase in rig counts is due to prices two months ago. There’s always a lag between price changes and drilling activity,” explained James Williams, economist at WTRG Economics in London, Ark. “With the recent drop in prices, we’ll probably see some pressure on rig counts to slack off again.”

On Friday, oil-services firm Baker Hughes said the number of U.S. oil rigs rose for a fourth straight week. There were a total of 672 rigs as of Friday, up two from a week ago. The number of rigs bottomed at 628 in late June, ending months of steep declines. Still, the number of rigs is down 917 from this time last year.

Oil began a plunge in mid-2014, driving the price of West Texas Intermediate futures on Nymex to less than $44 a barrel by March of this year from a high in June 2014 of around $107 a barrel.

Oil then saw a spring rebound, notching a 2015 high at $61.43 on June 10 before coming under renewed pressure that saw crude CLU25, take out the March lows Thursday.

The global supply glut that triggered the selloff last year hasn’t gone away. That glut is in part a product of a massive rise in U.S. shale-oil production over the last half-decade. And while U.S. production has fallen, it hasn’t declined as quickly as many had anticipated. That is partly because technological improvements allow frackers to get more oil out of fewer wells with less expense.

“Costs are down, rig efficiency is up, and they’re drilling in places where they get more wells,” Williams said. “Plus, their completion efficiencies are increasing. It seems every month somebody has a new and better way to frack a well.”

So, what does it all mean for Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries? OPEC and its members have kept pumping furiously in a relatively transparent effort to crush shale producers and reclaim global market share?

Despite the recent uptick in rig counts, major shale regions, with the exception of the Permian Basin, are on track to see production fall from last year. “So that’s a validation of the OPEC strategy if you want, but it didn’t validate it as much as they had hoped,” Williams said.

The Energy Information Administration estimated that U.S. crude-oil production averaged 9.5 million barrels a day in the first half of 2015—300,000 barrels a day more than in the fourth quarter of 2014 despite an almost 60% decline in the U.S. oil rig count since October.

The EIA said U.S. production began falling in May, partly due to temporary outages in the Gulf of Mexico, and predicted output would continue to fall through the third quarter of next year in response to lower prices.

That is all well and good, but even as shale producers have lowered their output, they’ve seen their production replaced by even lower-cost producers such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, said Pierre Lapointe, head of global strategy and markets at Montreal-based Pavilion, in a note.

Also read Mohamed El-Erian:Why $40 oil is here to stay.

Those countries, which are facing growing strains on public finances given the sharp drop in oil revenues since late last year, have an incentive to maintain, if not increase, production to stabilize their fiscal outlook, Lapointe said.

Low-cost producers will also want to safeguard global market share, which is another reason why the production share of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Russia has started to rise again after falling over much of last year, he said.