MOL is planning to expand its Romanian retail network to 190-200 stations over the next five years, according to representatives of the company attending the General Meeting of Shareholders. To achieve this, MOL estimates it will need to invest 70 million euros, which will see it occupy 15% of the Romanian retail market.
The expansion programme will have three main directions: acquisition of new networks; organic growth (greenfield investments); and network swapping (with other players between regions).
"We take two important criteria into account when we consider a new acquisition: location and unit potential. As a rule, an investment is justified if we are confident we will be able to trade around 3.5 million litres of fuel per year at the respective unit," said Slavomir Jankovic, marketing and retail manager with MOL.
After the integration of the Shell network, which is scheduled for completion by September, the consolidated management team will be restructured, meaning MOL and Shell Romania staff will be reduced to 130-140 people from the current 240.
MOL acquired the Romanian petrol station business of the Anglo-Dutch giant in two stages: in the summer of 2003, MOL Romania took over 23 petrol stations from Shell; this was followed by the Hungarian group's acquisition of Shell Romania SRL last November. Sources close to the business put the combined value of the two deals at 90 million dollars (73 million euros).
The first step in the integration of Shell Romania's network was completed recently through the transformation of the company into MOL Romania Comer] SRL, which will merge within six months with MOL Romania to form a single MOL company in Romania.
After the merger, MOL will have a network of over 133 stations and will rank among the top four players on the Romanian market in terms of network size. In the field of exploration and extraction, MOL plans to enter into new partnerships in Romania. Aldott Zoltan, the Mol group's upstream (exploration and production) manager, says he is not ruling out the possibility of partnerships with Romgaz and Petrom.
He also explained that the group's target for the coming 3 to 4 years was to raise the contribution of the upstream unit to EBITDA from 20 to 40%. In 2005 MOL hopes to reach a stock market capitalisation of over 10 billion euros. |
