  India Turns Bullish in International Oil Market Just bought a copy of BusinessWorld, the weekly AFFORDABLE business magazine.
It was exhilirating and exciting to see the Indian government and government organizations coming out of a shell and fighting it out in International Markets. The story discussed here is the fillip to the oil security intiative being undertaken by India. OVL Videsh managed to pick up a substantial share in Sakhalin 1, the gas fields in eastern Russia, bordering Japan. And that too, when it was competing with international oil giants like BP. The story unfurls a host of channels being utilized, including economic diplomacy et al.
This story makes an interesting thriller. Here is an excerpt: WELCOME to the world of global oil deals — the most thrilling game in town. It is a game that the Americans, Russians and British, and, recently, the Chinese and the Malaysians, have been playing — and one which India has just joined in. It involves picking up stakes in — and ideally control of — each key new oil field around the globe that gets discovered.
It is a playing field teeming with sharks — and the Indian players are still minnows. OVL has a turnover of a mere Rs 2,622 crore. The other Indian player, Oil India, is around the same size at Rs 2,000 crore. Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), however, has a turnover of Rs 119,848 crore ($25.5 billion), while Reliance Industries, India’s biggest private sector company and the only private sector player getting into the game, is all of Rs 60,000 crore ($12.8 billion).
By comparison, the smallest of the global oil giants, TotalFinaElf, had a turnover of $94 billion (2002). The biggest, ExxonMobil, is a $191-billion giant with operations in 75 countries. That’s not deterring the Indian players though. In the last four years, the Indian quartet has agreed to fork out nearly $3.3 billion (Rs 15,510 crore) between them to pick up interests in oilfields in 10 countries including Russia, Yemen, Sudan, Vietnam, Iraq and even the US. The whole story is available online at the urlLink Business World site. 
