Gazprom to Sell Off 9% in December

Gazprom, the world's largest natural-gas company, will put 9 percent of its shares up for sale before the end of the year in one of the most substantial offers of Russian shares to foreign investors to date, a company official announced Thursday.


Vladimir Belyakov, an aide to the Gazprom board of directors, said the sale would take place "in December," for the first time setting a time limit for the share offer, which has been in preparation for several months.


At Gazprom's currently quoted price, the sale would render Russia's gas monopoly close to $600 million in badly needed investment, but the value of the sale could vary widely depending on how actively investors bid.


Belyakov said the company had not decided exactly how the shares would be sold, leaving open the possibility that they would be offered directly to investors, rather than sold freely.


Kleinwort Benson, a prominent merchant bank based in London, has quietly been preparing the sale for Gazprom since August, Belyakov said. He added that Gazprom's long standing German partners Ruhrgas and Wintershalle were notified first, but by last month already close to 40 potential investors had expressed interest in the shares.


The company faces a net loss of $2.7 billion this year but higher prices and a new supply contract with Ukraine should render the firm $1 billion in net profits in 1995, according to the Russian Petroleum Investor trade magazine.


Gazprom earlier announced that it also plans to put new fields on stream, boosting production from 650 billion cubic meters in 1993 to 1 trillion cubic meters in 2010. With reserves estimated at a value of $1,500 billion, Gazprom is considered the largest natural-gas company in the world.


The government owns a 40 percent interest in Gazprom, although President Boris Yeltsin in September ordered his ministers to speed up the sale of state shares to raise funds for a $10 billion pipeline project.


According to Moscow brokers' quotations of the company's shares, Gazprom has a market capitalization of about $6.5 billion. This would mean that 9 percent of the shares should be worth around $585 million.


Gazprom recently made a 100-way split in the price of its shares, setting the nominal value of a share at 10 rubles. Earlier this week, shares were quoted at 880 rubles each -- providing the capitalization figure of $6.5 billion.


But that price could be low because so few shares in the company are freely sold. Belyakov said Gazprom shares recently sold for 15,510 rubles at a test sale on the Vladivostok stock exchange, where another 1 percent of the share package should soon be auctioned .


"That's not bad," Belyakov said, adding that Gazprom has not set a minimum price on its shares.


Gazprom has given or sold 43.7 percent of its shares to its employees over the past two years, 5.2 percent to the indigenous peoples in Russia's Far North and 1.1 percent to the Rosgazifikatsiya marketing company. The 9 percent now offered to foreigners and the 1 percent to be sold in Vladivostok make up the remaining 10 percent of Gazprom that no longer belongs to the state. Belyakov said that the company was not allowed to sell more than 9 percent of its shares to foreign investors, and that its directors have to approve share sales of more than 3 percent to individuals


Neither Ruhrgas nor Wintershalle could be reached for comment Thursday. A spokesman for Kleinwort Benson declined to give any details on the sale.