“It’s a matter of discovering resources. If you don’t have resources you
can’t grow. If you have to buy them that’s not the best thing in the world,”
Mr Gabrielli de Azevedo said.

“We have discoveries now and between 10bn and 16bn barrels of recoverable
resources.”

Petrobras completed the biggest ever public offering of stock totalling $70bn
last October.

However its shares have not risen since then, despite the soaring price of
crude, partly because of worries about the Brazilian government’s influence
on the taxation and profitability of the sector.

Petrobras is also under pressure from the state to rein in costs, as the
Brazilian government tries to get inflation under control.

Analysts have worried that Petrobras is taking on too much by trying to
develop too many of its pre-salt, deepwater oil fields all at once. These
discoveries lie off the south-east coast under two kilometres of salt in
deepwater.

However, Mr Gabrielli dismissed these concerns about the ambitiousness of
Petrobras’s programme, saying it had been managed before on such as large
scale.

“We have the same scope for production as the first ten years of the
North Sea,” he said.

Exxonmobil is currently the world’s largest listed company, but it is expected
to be overtaken by Apple. Four private companies – Saudi Aramco, Pemex,
Petróleos de Venezuela and Kuwait Petrol Corporation – are thought to have
bigger valuations.