It was always going to be about oil. "This oil story is a 30-year growth story," said the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva in September 2010.
On the back of huge offshore oil discoveries, Brazil's state oil company Petrobras had just successfully sold US$70 billion (Dh257bn) of stock to fund its ambitious growth plans.
"Never before in the history of man have we had a capitalisation of this size," Mr da Silva crowed.
Less welcome news emerged on August 3 this year.
Petrobras took advantage of a Friday afternoon during the Olympics to sneak out news of a $685 million loss, its first quarterly loss since 1999.
Founded in 1953, Petrobras was for much of its history a typical state-run monopoly, overstaffed and bureaucratic. But during the 1980s and 1990s, the discovery of fields off the Brazilian coast led it to evolve into a world leader in deepwater exploration.
In 1997, a change in the law meant it had to compete with other oil companies in Brazil for the first time. In 2000, a third of the company's shares were sold to the public and the government further reduced its holding later, making the company a darling both of Brazilians and investors.
Petrobras expanded into deepwater areas in Angola and the Gulf of Mexico and became one of the few national oil companies able to compete internationally on equal terms with the likes of Royal Dutch Shell and Total.
Yet Petrobras' real breakthrough came in 2006. It succeeded in drilling in 2,000 metres of water, then through 5,000 metres of rock, including thick layers of salt, to find a giant field later named Lula (meaning "squid" in Portuguese but also a sly homage to the president).
That year, Brazil became self-sufficient in oil. Further discoveries showed the "pre-salt", with the potential for 70-100bn barrels of oil, could be the world's most important find since the 1970s.
"We are extremely lucky that Brazil did not fall into our neighbours' populism," said Eike Batista, Brazil's richest man and himself the owner of an oil company, in 2010.
But did he speak too soon?
Petrobras' share price has been sliding consistently since late 2009 and is now below its 2006 level - before the first of the pre-salt discoveries.
It is quite an achievement for a company to have unearthed almost as much oil as Abu Dhabi's entire reserves, yet lose value.
Petrobras is simply being asked to do too much - to bear the whole burden of sustaining Brazil's "30-year" boom. Now, by law the operator of all new pre-salt blocks, it has to take a minimum 30 per cent share - even if its experienced geologists find an area unattractive.
Stringent rules demanding oil platforms be built locally, to develop Brazilian industry, have saddled it with higher costs, delays and skill shortages.
On top of this, Petrobras has to develop Brazil's refining sector, build infrastructure for the vast amounts of gas that will come with the pre-salt oil and expand its successful biofuels programme.
Subsidising domestic fuel to tame inflation cost it $6.2bn this quarter alone. It has accumulated $72bn of debt and needs to issue a further $80bn by 2016. These objectives would be too much for any company.
Petrobras' struggles matter for its investors, for Brazil and for the world, which is relying on the country as one of the major sources of new oil over the next decade. Brazil led the way in establishing a new breed of national oil company - bold, technologically advanced, outward-looking and competitive.
With Latin American populism having ruined two leading national oil companies, in Mexico and Venezuela, it would be sad if Petrobras were to join them.
Robin M. Mills is Head of Consulting at Manaar Energy, and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis and Capturing Carbon. Email: robin@oilcrisismyth.com and Twitter: @robinenergy
