Gazprom Confirms Letter on Mass Layoffs in Central Office
The company proposed to reduce the number of central office staff from 4,100 to 2,500 people, follows from a letter to the head of Gazprom. This letter is relevant, the company reported, but declined to comment on it.
The letter with the proposal of the Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Gazprom Elena Ilyukhina to the head of the company Alexey Miller about reducing the number of employees in the company’s central office is genuine. This was reported to Forbes by the Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Gazprom, Head of the Information Policy Department Sergey Kupriyanov.
“The document is relevant. We do not plan to comment,” Kupriyanov told the publication.
The plans for mass layoffs in Gazprom were previously reported by the St. Petersburg portal 47news. It noted that the company is considering the idea of cutting the company’s central office in half, from 4,100 to 2,500 people. Information about this was contained in Ilyukhina’s letter to Miller published by the publication. It was sent on December 23 and was called “On changing approaches to personnel management.”
The letter published by the publication stated that the number of employees in the Gazprom administration (the central office and branch 644 in St. Petersburg) is more than 4,100 people, whose wage fund has reached more than 50 billion rubles. “The challenges facing the Gazprom Group require reducing the time frame for preparing and making decisions, which requires work to eliminate duplicating functions, as well as excessive bureaucratic processes generated by personnel not regularly involved in the company’s activities.”
To this end, Ilyukhina proposed reducing the number of the company’s administration to about 2,500 employees, and using the freed-up funds “to improve motivation and develop personnel.”
In 2024, Gazprom reported a loss for the year for the first time in 25 years – then it amounted to 629 billion rubles for 2023. Before that, in 2022, Gazprom made a profit of 1.23 trillion rubles. The Ministry of Finance does not expect dividends from Gazprom for 2024, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in an interview with RBC. In December, the company’s shares fell to a minimum since 2009 and amounted to ₽106.1. On January 13, the company’s shares were trading at ₽129.8.
In 2015, Gazprom intended to increase the number of employees by 1%. This was how the company responded to Interfax reports about discussing staff reductions of 15-25%. In 2017, Gazprom and its subsidiaries were preparing to lay off up to 500 people. This was due to the idea of a phased transition to the implementation of new projects of the concern’s investment program based on EPC contracts, RBC sources reported.
Gazprom officially moved its central office to St. Petersburg in 2021, and it is now registered in the Lakhta Center building at 2 Lakhtinsky Prospekt, Bldg. 3, Bldg. 1. The former building of the company’s central office in Moscow on Nametkina Street was transferred to the balance sheet of Gazprom Transgaz Moscow LLC in the spring of 2024.
