Gazprom Ranked No. 1 by Forbes for Profitability Worldwide

Russian major Gazprom has topped Forbes Magazine's rankings of the world's most profitable companies in 2011, just ahead of American major ExxonMobil, the ITAR-TASS news agency has reported.

In the American edition of Forbes magazine released today, Gazprom topped the poll for most profitable company with profits of $44.46 billion last year. The company overtakes America's ExxonMobil, which topped the rankings for 2010. ExxonMobil slips to second place for 2011 with profits of $41.6 billion.

Third place on the list is taken by Chinese bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which was almost $10 billion behind second place with profits of $32.14 billion.

Gazprom tops the ranking despite a previous ranking by Forbes, which earlier this month put Gazprom as the second biggest oil and/or gas company in the world behind Saudi Aramco. However, this rating was based on output, for which Gazprom had an output of 9.7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day while Aramco had an output of 12.5 million barrels of oil equivalent a day.

Gazprom's high profits come partly as a result of a monopoly in several countries on the European market and its refusal to lower gas prices to a number of customers, several of which have entered arbitration with the company to force prices downwards.