Rusneftegaz marked the end of the current year by hosting our annual awards ceremony in Moscow last Friday, where a large contingent of our personnel joined with our executives and directors to celebrate our achievements over the past twelve months. Overall, it has been an outstanding period for our organization, in which we have demonstrated strong and sustainable growth in key areas of our enterprise. Whilst we may not have recorded vast increases in revenues as a result of broadly stagnant commodity prices, we are expected to expand our profit margins following major reductions in our operating expenses. Part of this is directly attributable to the restructuring process we undertook in the summer, where we reorganized our administrative departments into a single entity under the control of our leadership. In the long term, this should ensure that we are a more efficient business, in which all strategic aims are aligned amongst our subsidiaries, affiliates and partners. During the evening, Aleksandr Filyurin, our Deputy Chief Executive Officer, gave this statement:
“I am very pleased by what has been a very good year for Rusneftegaz. We have made excellent progress this year and are on course to meet all the targets that we set. This places us in a great position going into next year, where we will be able to continue with our plans to expand our operations further. To be direct, this is a great time to be working for this company, the plans we have are big and ambitious, and we will be reliant on our staff to help us do it. In a few years, Rusneftegaz will have been transformed into a far stronger company than it is today if our plans do come to fruition, which, to be fair, I expect them to. I also think it is a fitting time to place on record my congratulations to all the members of our team who have received prizes tonight, all of them are worthy winners. We need all our staff to be willing to go above and beyond the ordinary call of duty if we are going to do this, and to be direct, I think we do.”
On the night itself, the headline prize was awarded to Maksimilian Smirnov, who was named as our employee of the year. Over the past six years, he has established himself as one of our finest engineers, with a notably remarkable capacity to repair any machinery in a rapid and steadfast manner. This was particularly vital earlier this year, when a backup diesel generator failed and required complete dismantling to find the fault. Within a matter of hours, the aforementioned individual managed to diagnose the issue and improvise a replacement part, restoring power to a remote production site. On a similar note, our colleague Filipp Igantiev was chosen as our young employee of the year after he authored a number of papers and essays for his studies that were ultimately reviewed to critical acclaim. Not only did he finish first in his class, but he likewise initiated an extensive volume of additional research without assistance from any of his peers. Although these endeavors are both exceptional and noteworthy in their own right, we are extremely thankful to each and every member of our workforce for their efforts in helping us construct a corporation with an exciting and prosperous future. We vow to continue to do our utmost to reward these deeds, and hope that it is necessary to do so for many decades to come.
