Gazprom's H1 Profit Falls 12%, Q2 Rebound Saves the Year
Gazprom's net profit fell 12.1 percent to 863.9 billion rubles in the first half of 2026, but a 61 percent second quarter jump, driven by energy prices and exports to China, offset a weak start.
Russian energy group Gazprom’s net profit in the first half of 2026 came to 863.9 billion rubles, about $10 billion, according to the company’s report under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), published on August 28. That is 12.1 percent less than in the same period last year, when profit stood at 983.1 billion rubles. We have not previously covered Gazprom’s business, and this report is the first complete look at how the company fared in the first half of the year.
“The Gazprom Group’s net profit for the first half of the year came to 864 billion rubles,” said Famil Sadigov, deputy chairman of Gazprom’s Management Committee, in the company’s statement accompanying the results.
The half year decline masks a very different picture by quarter. Second quarter profit came to 518.6 billion rubles, up from 322.8 billion rubles in the same quarter a year earlier, a jump of about 61 percent. According to Sadigov, profit in the second quarter also rose 50 percent compared with the first quarter of this year. Revenue in the second quarter reached 2.5 trillion rubles, against 2.18 trillion rubles in the same period of 2025. In other words, the entire profit decline traces back to the first quarter, while the second quarter returned to growth.
The group’s total revenue for the first six months was 5.3 trillion rubles, or $61.5 billion, up 6.3 percent year over year. Revenue from the oil business grew 8 percent, and revenue from the gas business grew 3 percent, TASS reports. The Anadolu Agency, as carried by Biznis.rs, also reports that revenue from gas sales on the Russian domestic market rose 17 percent, while gas export volumes over the six months increased 8 percent.
The company attributes the second quarter result to rising global energy prices and to shifting sales toward the Chinese market after cutting deliveries to Europe. Gazprom scaled back sales to the European market after the war in Ukraine began, and has since been building a replacement primarily through the pipeline to China and through growth in domestic consumption.
The rest of the report shows the operating side of the business is stronger than the half year profit figure alone suggests. The group’s EBITDA came to 1.977 trillion rubles, up 28 percent from the same period last year, growing more than twice as fast as revenue. Free cash flow more than doubled, reaching 634 billion rubles.
The company’s debt load, meanwhile, is shrinking relative to earnings. Net debt stood at 6.055 trillion rubles, essentially unchanged from the end of 2025, but the net debt to EBITDA ratio fell to 1.81, from 2.07 at the end of last year. That drop in the ratio, with the absolute debt figure unchanged, means the company is earning more relative to what it owes, not that the debt has been paid down.
For Gazprom, that is a signal that a second quarter buoyed by rising energy prices and stronger exports to China can make up for a weaker start to the year. For the market, the message is simpler: a company that until recently built most of its revenue on Europe now increasingly depends on Chinese demand and world market prices, and the next quarterly report will show whether the second quarter’s growth is the start of a trend or just the product of a favorable moment in the energy market.
