Corporate News
This month, BP appoints a new Chairman and sells its Greek fuels business; Fuchs go hunting for new acquisitions; Total suffer in the Middle East; and Taiwan CPC consider a new lubricants plant.
BP's new Chairman has been named as Carl-Henric Svanberg, and will start his new role on 1 January 2010. Currently CEO of telecomms giant Ericsson and Chairman of Sony Ericsson, Mr Svanberg will replace BP's incumbent Chairman Peter Sutherland.
In the meantime, BP announced the sale of its Greek ground fuels marketing business to Hellenic Petroleum for $500m (subject to conditions). The deal coves 1200 BP-branded sites as well as the fuel distribution network. BP's other interests in Greece will remain within the BP Group.
Other sales over the month included Chevron, who have sold in principle their 58 service stations and 120 commercial customers in Haiti to Medley Capital. In Bulgaria, Prista Oil Group purchased a 92% stake in Hungarian chemical producer Bogdany Petrol; Holly Corporation finally completed its $65m purhase of Sunoco's 85,000 bpd refinery in Tulsa, stating that it will remain a lubricant plant; Germany's Lanxess AG are set to buy China's Jiangsu Polyols Chemical Co.; and Canada's Columbia Fuels' distribution business was bought by Parkland Income Fund for US$30m.
Fuchs made public their buying ambitions by announcing a $350m "war chest" to captialise on potential consolidations as a result of the global recession. In particular, they have their eyes on any of the oil producers looking to sell their lubricants business. One potential candidate could be South Korea's SK Energy who were rumoured to be looking to spin off their lubricants operations. SK have Group II and III production plants in South Korea and Indonesia, but also recently announced plans to expand production with two new plants in Europe or Asia from 2012.
A number of new partnerships emerged during the month. Taiwan's Chinese Petroleum Co hinted at plans to find a joint investment for a new refinery in China or Vietnam, their first plant outside Taiwan. Germany's BASF will co-operate with Italy's Fabbrica Adesive Resine with the latter handling all production of polyalcohol trimethylolpropane (TMP) for both companies. TMP is used in the production of synthetic lubricants.
In the UAE, EMA Lubricants (EMALU) appointed MPCL as distributor for its products (Mobil lubricants) for the Emirates, while a joint venture between Huntsman Corporation in the US and India's Laffan Petrochemicals will lead to shared expertise in surfactant and amine manufacturing in India.
Total had a busy month starting with the news of a 20% drop in lubricants sales in the Middle East, the company claiming surprise at the scale of the impact from the recession. The French oil producer was also hit by industrial action in the UK, not from refinery workers, but from building contractors working on a major plant upgrade at their Lindsey refinery. The action rapidly spread to other sites including power generation plants across the UK, before the issue was eventually resolved. On the upside, Total were still able to announce the appointment of AW Rostamani Trading as their distributor for their Elf Lubricants in Dubai and the Northern Emirates. And they were also looking to benefit further from an exponential rise in China's lubricants makret by establishing a partnership with Shanghai's TyrePlus Auto Accessories to combine retail distribution and marketing resources.
And finally, Japanese oil refiner Idemitsu announced that it would be investing $13.5m to double its lubricants production in Indonesia and increase treble its sales in the country by 2015, but it was go-stop in Bangladesh, where the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation's plans to import more than 20,000 tonnes of base oil from India were thwarted by a hike in prices by the Indian Oil Corporation.