Bloomberg: Gazprom’s Demise Could Topple Putin
No large company in the world has been so spectacularly mismanaged as Russia’s state-dominated natural-gas corporation Gazprom OAO. (GAZP) In the last decade, its management has made every conceivable mistake.
Even so, Russian President Vladimir Putin denies the very existence of a crisis and maintains his support for Alexei Miller, the chief executive officer since 2001. Gazprom’s situation is serious not only because it is Russia’s biggest company by market value, but because Putin is its real chairman. Where Gazprom goes, so does Russia and the Putin government.
In May 2008, Gazprom was one of the world’s most valuable companies with a market capitalization of $369 billion. Miller boasted that it would be the first global company to reach $1 trillion. Today, its market value has plummeted to $83 billion and the decline continues. Although it claimed the largest net income of any global company in 2011 at $44.5 billion and still at $38 billion in 2012, its price-earnings ratio has dropped to a fatally low 2.4 for 2013. It has no credibility with shareholders. MORE