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Unlike the 30 or so oligarchs who face sanctions from the EU, Konov is a career executive. As such, his media history is substantial, and the trajectory of his career – from young investment banker to CEO – can be easily traced. Konov also gave an exclusive interview to bne IntelliNews in 2018 in which he explained the company’s production processes, discussed the outlook for the petrochemicals sector and talked about the company’s newest facility. Here’s an overview of Konov’s career to date, based on what’s been written about him.
Patient rise Born into a family of geologists in Moscow, Konov started off in emerging Russian investment banks such as Renaissance Capital. He got his big breaks at Yukos Oil Company and Bank Trust, the cornerstones of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s business empire. Khodorkovsky fell out with Putin at around the same time, and was subsequently jailed on charges of fraud and embezzlement.
Konov has always been regarded as a patient businessman. When he applied for a job in a London bank in the 1990s, the employer deemed him “boring” in comparison to other candidates, Konov recalled in an interview with TASS. In 2001, in an effort to expand his international horizons, he completed an MBA at Switzerland’s IMD Business School.
Konov knew little about the petrochemicals industry in 2004 when he joined Sibur as a fresh-faced 34-year-old. “I realised at one moment that I would never be able to understand all the chemical reactions, so I quit trying,” Dmitry Konov told the Financial Times in an interview in 2018. “I know what products go to each industry and the economics of each process. That’s enough for me.” On the other hand, his time working in corporate finance at Bank Trust gave him the skillset he needed to go about restructuring the business. Having hopped about between roles at Sibur – working as adviser to the CEO, VP for strategy, and senior VP for business development – Konov was appointed CEO in 2006. With the help of a skilled management team, he transformed Sibur from a backward company in a pollution-heavy industry into a leading petrochemical producer and one of the first Russian companies with a sustainable development strategy.
Sibur had $2.5bn of debt when he joined, and was comprised of several dozen Soviet-era factories processing oil and gas products into various, often low-margin, chemical products. Under the re-structuring, Sibur sold off its lower-margin assets including mineral fertiliser plants and tyre factories, focusing instead on higher-margin products such as polymers. Sibur’s revenue grew from about $3bn in 2004 to nearly $16bn by 2021.
“We purchase by-products from oil and gas companies – associated petroleum gases (APG) from oil companies and natural gas liquids (NGL) from gas companies – collect them from the production site, bring them into one pipeline and process them into polymers and other products,” Konov told bne IntelliNews in 2018.
Sibur breaks these by-products down into their constituent parts, all of which can be used as fuel or to make one product or another. Polyolefins can
18 RUSSIA Country Report October 2020 www.intellinews.com