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Essar Oil is one private sector company which is most bullish on the fuel retailing segment, post diesel deregulation. After setting up 1,500 fuel outlets and having 1,400 under implementation, it is planning to set up another 2,100, taking the total tally to 5,000. This will make Essar Oil the largest private fuel retailer in the country.
“Our retail front is making a lot of progress... our target now is to reach 5,000 retail outlets,” said Lalit Kumar Gupta, managing director and chief executive officer, Essar Oil, in a video on the company’s website. Reliance Industries, another private fuel retailer, has 1,400 outlets but only 400 are operational. It plans to re-open the rest by March.
“Our retail front is making a lot of progress... our target now is to reach 5,000 retail outlets,” said Lalit Kumar Gupta, managing director and chief executive officer, Essar Oil, in a video on the company’s website. Reliance Industries, another private fuel retailer, has 1,400 outlets but only 400 are operational. It plans to re-open the rest by March.
Mangalore Refineries and Petrochemicals, another private retailer, has a blueprint in place to roll out 120 outlets in the first phase of expansion. The outlets will be first rolled out in its base state of Karnataka. It has approval to set up 500 outlets and its parent company, ONGC, has approvals to set up 1,100. Shell India, which has 80 outlets, plans to expand its network utilising its existing licence to set up 2,000 fuel stations.
Essar Oil said it had been doing sales of 1.8 million kilo litres of fuel per month and planned to take it to three million kilo litres by the end of this year. “On full implementation of diesel deregulation, the network will prove to be a great value booster,” the company had earlier told Business Standard. In its expansion drive, Essar has fuel retail outlets under all formats — company owned, company operated (Coco), company owned, dealer operated (Codo) and dealer owned, dealer operated (Dodo).
A person aware of Essar’s expansion plans said the company planned 10 per cent of the 3,000 outlets under the CoCo format. “Essar has so far invested around Rs 10 crore in CoCo outlets. Going forward, it would like to invest Rs 300-350 crore in these. On an average, a CoCo outlet requires an investment of Rs 1-1.5 crore,” the official added.
