As reported by the St. Petersburg portal 47news, the company is considering the possibility of laying off 1,600 employees of the head office — a corresponding letter to Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller was sent by Deputy Chairman of the Management Board Elena Ilyukhina. In the document, she points out the “challenges facing the Gazprom Group” and the “need to optimize costs at all levels of management and production processes.”

As Ilyukhina writes, Gazprom currently spends 50 billion rubles annually on salaries of central office employees alone. Their number, according to Ilyukhina’s estimates, can be reduced from 4,100 to 2,500 people.

Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of Gazprom, Head of the Information Policy Department Sergei Kupriyanov confirmed the authenticity of the letter to Forbes. Gazprom plans to select candidates for dismissal within a month — by February 15, according to the document.

Having cut off gas to most European countries in a failed attempt to achieve concessions on Ukraine, Gazprom lost two-thirds of its exports: in 2023, its deliveries to distant countries amounted to 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.

In 2024, pumping to Europe increased slightly, to 32 billion cubic meters per year, according to Reuters estimates, but remained 5.5 times lower than pre-war levels (180 billion cubic meters in 2018-19). The Kremlin's hopes for China, to which Vladimir Putin proposed increasing gas purchases to 100 billion cubic meters per year, turned out to be in vain. 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, compensated Gazprom for only a quarter of its previous supplies to the European Union even after reaching full capacity - 38 billion cubic meters per year.

According to the results of 2023, Gazprom received its first net loss in a quarter of a century under international reporting standards (IFRS), and its size - 629 billion rubles - became a record for the entire time that the company has existed. In 2024, Gazprom returned to profit under IFRS - it amounted to 989 billion rubles for January-September. However, its gas business remained deeply unprofitable: for the first half of the year, losses amounted to 480.6 billion rubles, according to RAS reporting.

The cessation of gas transit through Ukraine from January 1, 2025 will deprive Gazprom of approximately $6 billion in annual revenue, estimates BCS analyst Ronald Smith. The Ukrainian route, which was launched half a century ago and became the first channel for gas exports from the USSR to Europe, transported about 12-15 billion cubic meters of gas from the Russian Federation per year after the start of the war. The main consumers of gas along this line were Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic, as well as Ukraine itself, which received reverse gas from the EU.