The world's largest gas company, the Russian giant Gazprom, on Thursday announced a rise in second quarter profits of around 30 percent to 202.0 billion rubles ($6.17 billion) helped by rising sales of gas to Europe. Gazprom said its profits for the first half of 2013 amounted to 582.7 billion rubles ($17.8 billion), 13 percent higher than the same period last year, while total sales across its operations were up around 15 percent to 2.57 trillion rubles ($78.4 billion).