Rosgeo earns 10% of revenue from foreign projects, aims to raise this to 30% after 2030

MOSCOW. April 8 (Interfax) - Foreign projects generate about 10% of Rosgeo's revenue, the Russian state exploration company's CEO, Sergei Radkov told reporters.

"The international business is one of our main areas for potential development, because Rosgeo is the only geological exploration services operator on the foreign market. We work in all areas, from geological audit - mapping - to drilling. If you take the portfolio of projects, foreign ones are now around 10% of our revenue," Radkov said.

He said Rosgeo's strategy calls for increasing the share of revenue generated by foreign projects to 30% on the horizon beyond 2030.

"The potential is very great. If you go back to pre-sanctions years, just offshore work generated 6 billion rubles, and if sanctions go away, it will, perhaps, be more. But even now we're developing cooperation with friendly countries - Latin America, Africa. And there is demand [for Rosgeo services abroad]," Radkov said.

The company said it worked on 13 areas of geological exploration in nine countries in 2024 and that revenue from international operations more than tripled year-on-year to 2.6 billion rubles. The plan for 2025 is to work in 18 areas in 11 countries, with revenue expected to exceed 3 billion rubles.

However, there are nuances to Rosgeo's expansion on foreign markets, first deputy CEO Andrei Didukh said.

"At present the issue with support for exports of high-tech services [like the support given to exports of equipment made in Russia], which is what geological exploration is, has not been resolved. Rosgeo is virtually the only integrated production business that exports Russian high-tech products in the form of comprehensive geological exploration. We, of course, need this," Didukh said.

"Unfortunately, the issue has not been fundamentally resolved yet. We hope that decisions to one degree or another will be made soon. Then we'll be able to seriously compete with the main players on international exploration markets, because, unlike the main players, we don't have support. In other words, we go into tenders exclusively with our own finances, while at some of the main players government subsidies go as high as 80%," Didukh said.

Rosgeo is a state holding company that includes more than 40 geological enterprises that operate in Russia's regions and internationally. The group does all types of geological exploration work, from regional surveys of all types of mineral resources to calculating reserves and launching deposit development, and has unique competencies in the area of marine geology and offshore work.