...New Price Deck: Fitch Ratings has revised its base-case price deck per barrel of Brent to USD55 in 2015, USD65 in 2016, and USD80 in the long term. We believe that the oil price will adjust to the marginal cost of supply during the course of the next one to two years, but an alternative scenario is that prices will not recover in the medium term. Taking into account the overall uncertainty in the market we now put more emphasis on stress testing to see how oil and gas (O&G) companies will fare under USD55 in the medium term. Less Earnings Volatility: The earnings of Russian O&G companies are less volatile than those of most of their international peers, primarily due to the progressive tax regime in the upstream sector, the relative flexibility of the rouble exchange rate, and ¡ in the case of gas producers ¡ regulation of domestic natural gas prices. All these factors smoothed the Russian majors' EBITDA drop in 2009, when oil prices collapsed, and we expect the same factors to help out...
