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Gazprom, (Газпром; long version: Открытое Aкционерное Oбщество Газпром; sometimes transcribed as Gasprom) is the largest Russian company. Gazprom is publicly traded as ; ОАО Газпром. Gazprom is the biggest extractor of natural gas in the world. With sales of US$31 billion in 2004, it accounts for about 93 percent of Russian natural gas production; with reserves of 28,800 km³, it controls 16 percent of the world's gas reserves (as of 2004 , including the Shtokman field.) After acquisition of the oil company Sibneft, Gazprom, with 119 billion barrels of reserves, ranks behind only Saudi Arabia, with 263 billion barrels, and Iran, with 133 billion barrels, as the world's biggest owner of oil and oil equivalent in natural gas.
By the end of 2004 Gazprom was the sole gas supplier to at least Bosnia-Herzegovina, Estonia, Finland, Macedonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and Slovakia, and provided 97 percent of Bulgaria's gas, 89 percent of Hungary's, 86 percent of Poland's, nearly three-quarters of the Czech Republic's, 67 percent of Turkey's, 65 percent of Austria's, about 40 percent of Romania's, 36 percent of Germany's, 27 percent of Italy's, and 25 percent of France's. The European Union as a whole gets about 25 percent of its gas supplies from this company.
Apart from its gas reserves and the world's longest pipeline network (150,000 km), it also controls assets in banking, insurance, media, construction and agriculture.
As measured by its market capitalization as of December 2007 (US$345 billion), Gazprom is the world's third largest corporation following this measure. Gazprom chairman Dmitry Medvedev hopes that the company's market capitalization will quadruple to reach one trillion dollars by 2017, and that this would make it the world's biggest corporation.





