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The Moscow Times: Gazprom’s $1 Trillion Objectives

Tuesday, April 10, 2007. Issue 3633. Page 6.
Bloomberg

Gazprom aims to quadruple its market value to $1 trillion within a decade and become the world’s biggest company.

“We will reach a $1 trillion market capitalization in a period of seven to 10 years,” deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev said in an interview Friday. “We’d like to be the most valued and most capitalized company in the world.”

The goal would be more than twice today’s $439.6 billion market value of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded company, and would exceed Russia’s 2006 economic output of $975 billion. It would also surpass the gross domestic product of countries including the Netherlands, Australia and South Korea.

Gazprom has more than eight times ExxonMobil’s total reserves and is seeking more. The company took control last year of Royal Dutch Shell’s Sakhalin-2 venture, which plans to start shipping liquefied natural gas in 2008.

It’s also developing the Shtokman project in the Arctic, the country’s largest untapped deposit of the fuel.

“I believe it’s a reasonable target that we’ll double our market cap” from its current $244 billion in five years, Medvedev said.

The company’s shares in London climbed 60 percent last year, outpacing a 36 percent increase for ExxonMobil.

“Gazprom does have the potential if the management were willing to implement reforms and cost-cutting,” said Steven Dashevsky, head of research at Aton Capital. “You can see very little of what the Gazprom management has done to make the business more valuable.”

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