| The Russian gas sector remains a monopoly Today, the tenth international exhibition "Neftegaz-2004" opens in Moscow - one of the most authoritative forums for representatives of the global energy industry. News from the oil market lately has been reminiscent of front-line reports: military operations, terrorist attacks. Political and price instability in the oil sector is transmitted through a unique technological chain to other sectors of the energy market. Meanwhile, the industry is now going through an important stage of restructuring. This is especially true for the European oil, gas and electricity markets, on the basis of which the future integrated energy market of the European Union is being formed. At the same time, the main concern of Europeans is the growing dependence on energy imports. This is the theme of this issue of Energy Europe: the corporate and technological aspects of industry restructuring.
One of these days the annual meeting of Gazprom shareholders will take place, at which the results of work in 2003 will be officially summed up. The year turned out to be very successful, primarily due to the good export situation. The chairman of the concern's board, Alexey Miller, said in an interview without much modesty that “this was Gazprom’s best year.” “The company is financially stable, the balance sheet structure has noticeably improved, and the cost of capital for Gazprom is decreasing. The state of the company allows us to set and solve the most ambitious tasks,” said Mr. Miller. The profit of the parent company almost tripled compared to the results of 2002 and reached 142 billion rubles. The capitalization of the concern also tripled. Today it is already about $50 billion. At the same time, dividends have increased to a lesser extent: for each share, the Gazprom board of directors recommended paying 69 kopecks - only 29 kopecks more than a year earlier. Although, according to the company's dividend policy, shareholders should have received one and a half times more. In total, it is proposed to allocate 11.5% of net profit to dividends, which corresponds to 16 billion rubles.
Despite Gazprom's financial successes, the situation with the development of the gas industry does not yet inspire much optimism. Monopolization continues to increase, which may bring serious troubles in the near future.
Reform of the Russian energy sector has so far proceeded unevenly. While the oil and coal industries began to operate in market conditions quite a long time ago, the electricity and gas sectors still remain state monopolies with occasional additions of market mechanisms and attributes. The restructuring of natural monopolies was declared one of the Kremlin's economic policy priorities at the beginning of Vladimir Putin's first term. However, immediately after his re-election, Mr. Putin himself dotted all the i's, saying that reforming the main natural monopoly, Gazprom, was not on the agenda of the Russian leadership.
The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade insisted on the restructuring of Gazprom, whose head, German Gref, with enviable persistence, introduced to the government concepts for the development of the gas market in Russia, which provided for the gradual demonopolization of the industry. However, not a single consideration of this issue took place at a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers. The latest transfer of the slippery topic took place quite recently - in the government's plan for this year, the issue was planned for June until May, but a month ago it was again postponed until the fall. And Mr. Gref’s authority to initiate reforms through an effort of political will was removed in favor of Viktor Khristenko, who is more “restrained” and not prone to market radicalism in relation to the gas monopoly, who headed the newly created mega-department of the Ministry of Industry and Energy.
The European Union also advocated active structural reforms, whose representatives at the negotiations on Russia’s accession to the WTO included this requirement in the “ultimatum” to the Russian side. But realizing that we were talking about the categorical position of the Russian President, the European negotiators chose not to insist on their position.
However, despite the fact that the country's leadership actually refused to reform Gazprom, the management of the monopoly unexpectedly announced that transformations, it turns out, were underway. The head of the concern, Alexey Miller, who is considered a “protégé” of the country’s president, announced through the press service that the first stage of reform has been successfully completed and the second is beginning. From the statements of Gazprom managers it follows that for more than three years the concern has been in full swing with reform, the first stage of which was aimed at increasing the efficiency of the parent company. “The main tasks of the first stage of the reform have been completed: the management structure has been improved, areas of responsibility have been clearly defined, regulations have been spelled out, and a budgeting system has been introduced,” said the Gazprom press service. “Now we can move on to the second stage of reform - increasing the efficiency of Gazprom as a vertically integrated company that combines all cycles: exploration, production, transportation, refining and sales.”
Thus, the company made it clear that last year’s discussions on structural reforms in the gas industry were removed from the agenda and Gazprom would decide independently how to live next. It is characteristic that the moment chosen is extremely inconvenient for the main shareholder of the monopoly - the government, which, due to the administrative reform, is now in no time for this. At the most important stage of working out the reforms, the new cabinet of ministers found itself outside the scope of the process and was ultimately confronted with a fact: having conveniently replaced the development of the gas market and the demonopolization of the gas industry with the improvement of the monopoly structure, Gazprom set about further suppressing competition.
The most important task of the “second stage” was the optimization of the management structure of the main activities at the level of subsidiaries. Each “subsidiary” should focus on its main business - have one main function, and not scatter production resources on related and sometimes non-core activities. In this case, a non-core function of one company can be transferred to another, for which this function is core, some companies will be merged, and new companies will appear. “We want to consolidate all the main areas of business in individual companies and thereby achieve complete transparency of financial flows,” says a company representative.
According to the plan of the monopoly's management, the "subsidiaries" will be, as much as possible, "cleaned" of functions unusual for them - first of all, we are talking about gas transportation enterprises. Currently, four of the 17 “transgases” - Severgazprom, Orenburggazprom, Astrakhangazprom and Surgutgazprom - in addition to transportation, are engaged in other types of business (gas production or processing), which does not allow us to correctly calculate the economically justified tariff for gas transit , subject to government regulation. Gazprom leaders spoke about their intention to “cleanse” these structures of “non-core” activities a year ago, but concrete actions have not been taken since then. This once again demonstrates the serious shortcomings of delegating almost all functions and powers to management to develop and implement changes.
In addition, the main results of the reform are expected to create separate subsidiaries of Gazprom, which will be exclusively engaged in gas storage, oil production and sales, as well as gas distribution.
Thus, for now we can only talk about the creation of working groups on various areas of reform, which in three months after the re-election of Vladimir Putin did not even collect all the proposals for reforms from subsidiaries. The task they have been given is quite ambitious: by the end of the year, prepare specific decisions for consideration at meetings of the board of directors of Gazprom. Alexander DAVYDOV |
|
