Happy New Year 2010 and Happy Birthday Oil&Gas Eurasia! Ten Years in Russia and We Survived!

   Happy New Year! 2010 is a special year for Oil&Gas Eurasia and myself. It’s our 10-year anniversary. And I’d like to tell you a little bit about how Oil&Gas Eurasia came to be.

   I came to the former USSR to be a foreign correspondent in 1992. I planned a two-year adventure; fate had other plans. After working three months as a journalist in Kiev, I was approached to help set up a news wire service and business consultancy. I went to Almaty to organize the Kazakh part of the business.

   In 1992, the entire foreign community lived in what was then the best hotel – the Kazakhstan Hotel! Imagine! Flags of just about every country hung out the windows of foreign embassies located at the hotel. The only restaurant was across the street in the basement of the hotel linked to the Communist Party. The chef there was from San Antonio, Texas. And in November 1992, the U.S. Ambassador, Bill Courtney, hosted Thanksgiving Day dinner there. The entire American community came and ate chicken pretending to be turkey with a fruity red sauce pretending to be cranberries. There were so few of us, we gathered around one big round table.

RPI, the Father of Russia’s Oil&Gas Trade Press

   Then came the proposal from Russian Petroleum Investor (RPI) and I found myself in Moscow as their first Russia-based English language editor. Many of you know RPI but do you know the individuals who started RPI started the entire oil and gas magazine industry in Russia?

   RPI was an English language publication which explained to Western oil majors how they could participate in Russian projects. I had the privilege of writing about this process at a time when companies such as LUKOIL were being created out of assets of the former Soviet Oil Ministry. For example, “LUK” refers to the assets of the Langepas, Urai and Kogalym production associations.

   The owners of RPI soon saw the opportunity in creating a second publication – Neft i Kapital which would be Russian language and carry advertising of Western companies along with industry information of use to Russian senior managers. That was 1995. Neft i Kapital was the first advertising-driven oil and gas magazine to hit the market. A year later, as RPI restructured and the original partners went their separate ways, Neft i Kapital got a new owner, and another of the former RPI partners created Neftegazovaya Vertical to compete with Neft i Kapital.

   I had moved on to another entrepreneurial venture meantime – London-based Petroleum Argus. I joined them as their Russia representative. Three years later, I had built a company with a rep office in Moscow, 15 employees and new product launches to serve Russian readers in Russian language and foreign readers in English language.

Enough Experience, Time to Do My Own Thing

   It was out of this experience in the 1990s that I conceived the idea for my own company and the Oil&Gas Eurasia brand. So just after New Year in 2000, I went to work on the first issue. There was an exhibition coming up in March in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, and I wanted to test the bilingual format. So I started calling friends – businessmen who might buy an ad; journalist friends who might write an article, and a designer friend who had a Macintosh computer and the right software at his house. I wrote half of the articles myself; sold all the ads myself; my designer friend called a friend of his at the old Tass photo library at Kievskaya Station and together we sifted through files of hard copy photographs to find a cover shot that had something to do with Central Asia. We chose a shot of camels but learned later that the camels on our cover were not Central Asian camels, the humps were the wrong shape!

   In Ashgabat, the concept was well received. And with MIOGE facing us in June, a friend of mine at TNK offered to get me an interview with their CEO, Simon Kukes. TNK also bought advertising. My father, Tom Davis, and a family friend, Jim Romanski had decided to visit Moscow as tourists in June. So, I told them if they would distribute magazines at MIOGE, they would get a side trip to Baku to help me at the Caspian Oil&Gas show. Boy, did we have fun – particularly when I almost fell into a mud volcano while showing Dad and Jim the sites around Gobustan.

   September and October 2000 I spent in Houston searching for advertisers. Schlumberger bought all the back covers and a Russian oil engineer working with another friend of mine in Houston on ESP suggested I write a letter to ALNAS. I did and they bought the front cover to give their CEO the same treatment as TNK’s Simon Kukes. Oil&Gas Eurasia was now off and running.

And Speaking of Marina – that Sales Person Who Keeps Calling You!

   Proud mother that I am, I will certainly write more on the entrepreneurial spirit in coming months. But before I close, I want to mention one OGE employee, Marina Alyoshina, to whom I credit a big part of Oil&Gas Eurasia’s success. Many of you know her as our senior sales manager. She was my second employee. I hired her as the office secretary and had no idea about her real talent until NEFTEGAZ 2001. I’d assigned her to sit at our stand and collect business cards while I walked the exhibition floor. At the end of the day I returned to the stand exhausted and with little success in having closed any advertising sales. But Marina? She was entertaining about a dozen visitors. She greeted me proudly with the news that she had sold two ads.

   I replied, “maybe you’re in the wrong job. We’ll get another secretary and you can sell ads.” And that’s how the whole thing started! Write me at p.szymczak@eurasiapress.com

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