Petróleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras; pronounced Petrobrás[a]) is a publicly traded company, whose majority shareholder is the Government of Brazil (Federal Government), being, therefore, a mixed economy state-owned company. Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, it currently operates in 14 countries in the energy segment, primarily in the areas of exploration, production, refining, marketing and transportation of oil, natural gas and their derivatives. Its current motto is “An integrated energy company that operates with social and environmental responsibility”. In 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Petrobras was ranked as the seventieth largest public company in the world.

The company was established on 3 October 1953 and ceased monopolising the oil industry in Brazil in 1997, but it remains a major producer of the product, with a daily output of over 2 million barrels (320,000 cubic metres). The multinational owns refineries, tankers and is a major distributor of oil derivatives. Petrobras is a world leader in the development of advanced technology for oil exploration in deep and ultra-deep waters.

Petrobras was in 2011 ranked fifth among the world’s largest publicly traded oil companies. In market value, it was the second largest company on the American continent and the fourth largest in the world in 2010. In September 2010, it became the second largest energy company in the world, always in terms of market value, according to data from Bloomberg and Agência Brasil. In September 2010, the company became internationally known for carrying out the largest capitalisation in open capital in history: 72.8 billion dollars (at the time 127.4 billion reais), practically double the record until then, which was Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), with 36.8 billion dollars capitalised in November 1987.

In 2014, however, Petrobras had a loss of 21.587 billion reais, the largest since 1986 and the company’s first since 1991. The loss of money caused by corruption between 2004 and 2012 was estimated at 6.194 billion reais. In 2015, Petrobras recorded a loss of 34.8 billion reais, as a result of the drop in the price of a barrel of oil on the international market, the economic crisis in the country, and the crisis related to Operation Lava Jato, which caused the company to suspend its investments, which hit the service and equipment supplier network hard. Petrobras is responsible for 0.77% of the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions in the period from 1988 to 2015, and therefore one of the biggest contributors to climate change causing “risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply and economic growth.”

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