Exxon employs *a lot* of contractors, and it also subcontracts out loads of its activities, thus lowering the number of staff whilst maintaining its revenue.

The reason why Gazprom employs so many people is the same reason any state-owned giant employs loads of people: most of the positions are no more than an exercise in job creation. Three years in the Middle East taught me well how national oil companies themselves full of locals in nonsense positions serving no purpose whatsoever. Bloated and inefficient are the adjectives I’d use.

Actually, rather than simply total employee count, I was thinking more about Gazprom in comparison to other major oil companies. For example, according to this page ExxonMobile has 82K employees with $39B in income. According to this pageGazprom had a net income of $24B for 2006. The difference may be more in the use of contractors than per employee efficiency, but still it gives an idea of why I was surprised by the Gazprom employee count.

By the way, here is an old article that I found while looking for the income numbers: Why Russians Love Gazprom.

How long, I wonder, before the NHS begins to employ its own private army to protect it from overly demanding patients…?

The quote from the article that most amazed me was this:
Gazprom is already described by some observers as a state within a state: it has 430,000 employees, controls some of Russia’s biggest media outlets, has a firm grip on gas exports and owns the country’s third largest bank.

According to Wikipedia 430K employees would make Gazprom the 169th most populous nation in the world!

On the other hand… Better than having the real army do domestic duty….:(

Even in the Middle East I never came across a private company protecting the pipelines (it probably occurs in Iraq, in certain sections). It certainly doesn’t happen in most oil and gas producing companies, although parts of Africa and South America certainly do follow this route.

One thing is for sure, this is an unusual step for an oil and gas company to take in its own country, and far from a common step to take anywhere. Let’s see if any private armies turn up on Sakhalin.

For edification purposes, it’s a good idea to get a full understanding of the pro-private army perspective, as opposed to a sudden knee jerk reaction.

Glad you enjoy the pictures. Sometimes I get carried away, and spend more time looking for cool pictures to illustrate a post than I do actually writing the post itself, which is a bad habit…

Just so you know your effort is appreciated, I always like the little graphics that you post with the articles.