The rise of Smart Diesel, which is now an independent filling station operator in Romania and posted almost EUR100 million revenue last year, shows the energy sector is still a very fertile soil for businesses with exponential growth year by year, despite market decline.
“Smart Diesel SRL is a completely automatic service, exclusively dedicated to internal and international transport companies and to all commercial fleet owners, regardless of the size of the fleet,” the company website reads.
“The Smart Diesel stations are equipped with the latest generation fuelling pumps, with high-power delivery force of about 130 liters per minute specialized in fuelling trucks. Exclusively dedicated to large vehicles, these fuel pumps considerably reduce the time allotted to the fuelling process as well as the costs.”
Smart Diesel representatives did not provide additional details about how the business operates or why the growth in revenue by press time.
The corporate website also says that the holders of Smart Diesel fuel cards have access to 80 filling stations in Spain, Luxemburg, Slovenia, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Austria and Romania. In Romania, it operates a network of 22 filling stations, according to publicly available information.
Its financial reports submitted to the Finance Ministry show the company posted 438,9 million lei (almost EUR100 million) revenue in 2014, an increase of about 20% on 2013. Smart Diesel therefore becomes the largest independent filling station operator in Romania if taking into account the companies whose core business is retail sale of automotive fuel in specialized stores.
The largest shareholder of the company is another company, Transport Service Group, as well as several individuals: Daniel Imbre, Ovidiu Ioan Andries, Petru Farcas, some of whom also own stake in Transport Service Group.
Fuel sales in Romania amount to about 5.8 million to 6 million tons or EUR9 billion to EUR9.5 billion a year, with diesel oil accounting for two thirds of them.
There are more than 2,000 filling stations in operation in Romania. The largest operator is OMV Petrom, 544 stations. Second leading company is Rompetrol, held by Kazakhstan’s KazMunayGas, while Russia’s Lukoil ranks third with 300 stations, followed by MOL Romania, which reached 200 stations this year.
The other two big names on the market, NIS and Socar, have not developed as much as initially estimated yet.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)