At the request of the world's largest gas company, the world's largest oil company shared best practices in specific areas of finance and information technology last month. With both Saudi Aramco and Gazprom serving the world's energy markets, expanding through product diversification and operating a vast array of business functions, Gazprom sees Saudi Aramco as a peer for comparison. With market capitalization of more than $345 billion, 19.0 percent of global gas production, 16.5 percent of global gas reserves and more than 300,000 employees, Moscow-based Gazprom is one of the world's largest public energy companies. Led by Dr. Andrey Kruglov, deputy chairman and chief financial officer, the Moscow-based delegation shared insights into the global energy market and provided an overview of its strategy to transform from an international gas company to an international energy company. Company management from Aramco, along with finance, IT and facilities planning specialists met in Dhahran with the Gazprom delegation to share knowledge. ”Gazprom is evolving rapidly from being purely a gas company to a full-fledged energy provider of gas, oil, and electricity to Russia, Europe and beyond,” Kruglov said. “Therefore, it is essential that the finance function be positioned to enable Gazprom's continued growth in the gas market and expansion into oil production and electricity generation and distribution.” The seven-member delegation, which included Yaroslav Golko, head of the Investment and Construction Department, and Sergey Yatsenko, first deputy head of the Finance and Economics Department, met with various finance, IT and facilities planning specialists to discuss topics such as planning and performance management, joint-venture development, project financing, Saudi Aramco's information technology infrastructure, and development of the talent necessary for finance to provide high-quality data analysis, decision support and advisory services. With integration of the IT function in Gazprom's finance organization, Yatsenko outlined the delegation's objective as “learning from Saudi Aramco's experiences in development of corporate KPIs (key performance indicators), transforming the finance organization, and managing IT,” with particular interest in IT tools used by Saudi Aramco to improve the efficiency and timeliness of financial transactions and the companywide availability of financial data for making business decisions. Aramco's Finance Senior Vice President Abdullatif A Al-Othman expressed his appreciation to the visitors for establishing a dialogue with the Finance Department and with Saudi Aramco, and he encouraged all of those in attendance to follow through on the future opportunity for knowledge sharing. __
