At a Christmas breakfast with journalists, Aldemir Bendine, the chief executive of Petrobras, said Brazil’s state-controlled oil company was aiming to become “smaller” thanks to an array of planned asset sales. The comment was in marked contrast to the company’s ambitions a few years ago, when Petrobras was contracting a fleet of oil services vessels bigger than Britain’s Royal Navy in a race to exploit huge offshore discoveries near Rio de Janeiro, and thereby turn Brazil into an oil power. But, for the most important company in Latin America’s biggest economy, simply surviving what has been an annus horribilis in 2015 ranks as an achievement for Petrobras, say analysts. Reeling from one of the world’s largest corruption scandals, the company in April published much-delayed results for 2014 in which it plunged to a net loss of R$21.6bn after a one-off hit of R$50.8bn (US$16.8bn) — of which R$6.2bn related to investigations into the company, with much of the remainder involving writedowns stemming from the oil price crash. In November, Petrobras reported net income of R$2.1bn for the nine months to September 30, down 58 per cent compared to the same period last year. This partly reflected increased interest payments on the company’s towering borrowings — at $104bn, Petrobras has the largest net debt level in the energy sector. Petrobras’s preference shares have fallen almost 35 per cent over the past 12 months after the company stopped paying dividends. 2016 does not promise to be much easier for the company. Mr Bendine, who was appointed chief executive in February to clean up Petrobras, will need to fight investor lawsuits over losses incurred during the corruption scandal while increasing production and selling assets at a time when oil is trading at multiyear lows.