Currently, Gazprom annually spends 50 billion rubles on salaries for employees of the central office alone. Their number is expected to decrease from 4.1 thousand to 2.5 thousand people.
Having lost the European gas market and received hundreds of billions of rubles in losses, Russian Gazprom is preparing for massive layoffs of central office employees. The company is considering the possibility of laying off 1.6 thousand employees of the headquarters – a corresponding letter was sent to the head of Alexei Miller by the Deputy Chairman of the Board Elena Ilyukhina. Russian media reported this on Monday, January 13.
In the document, he pointed out “the challenges facing the Gazprom group and the need to optimize costs at all levels of management and production processes.” As Ilyukhina said, Gazprom now spends 50 billion rubles annually on salaries for central office employees alone. Their number, according to Ilyukhina, can be reduced from 4.1 thousand to 2.5 thousand people.
The Deputy Chairman of the Board, Head of the Department of Information Policy Sergei Kupriyanov confirmed to Forbes the authenticity of the letter. The company plans to approve candidates for dismissal within a month – until February 15.
By cutting off gas to most European countries in an unsuccessful attempt to win concessions in Ukraine, Gazprom lost two-thirds of its exports: in 2023, its supplies of non-CIS countries reached only 69 billion cubic meters, the lowest since 1985. And exports to Europe fell to 28 billion cubic meters – the level of the second half of the 1970s.
By 2024, pumping in Europe increased slightly – up to 32 billion cubic meters per year, according to Reuters estimates, but remained 5.5 times lower than pre-war levels. The Kremlin’s hopes for China, where Putin proposed to increase gas purchases to 100 billion cubic meters per year, did not materialize. Xi Jinping never signed a contract for the construction of the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline, and the Power of Siberia-1 pipeline, launched at the end of 2019, paid Gazprom for only a quarter of the previous ones supply to the EU even after reaching full capacity – 38 billion cubic meters per year.
By the end of 2023, Gazprom received its first net loss in a quarter of a century according to international reporting standards, and its size – 629 billion rubles – became a record in the entire history of the company. In 2024, Gazprom returned to profit according to IFRS – it reached 989 billion rubles for January-September. However, its gas business remained deeply unprofitable: in the first half of the year, losses amounted to 480.6 billion rubles.
Stopping gas transit to Ukraine from January 1, 2025 will deprive Gazprom of about $6 billion in annual revenue, BCS analyst Ronald Smith estimates. The Ukrainian route, which was launched half a century ago and became the first channel for the export of gas from the USSR to Europe, delivered about 12-15 billion cubic meters of gas from the Russian Federation every year after of the start of the war. The main consumers of gas on this route are Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic, as well as Ukraine, which received reverse gas from the EU.
We remind you that in 2023 Gazprom suffered a record loss since its creation in 1990 in the amount of $6.1 billion.
Source: korrespondent
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