MOL Group completed the acquisition of the entire share capital of ENI Hungaria, a company managing 173 Agip branded service stations in Hungary (including dealer owned sites) as well as wholesale activities in the country (excluding the Eni branded lubricant wholesale business). MOL Group now owns a retail network of over 2,000 service stations across 10 countries in Central Eastern Europe (CEE).
As a result of the acquisition MOL’s retail network grows to over 500 service stations in Hungary. The newly acquired stations extend MOL Group’s captive market whilst further improve its ability to reach customers with good retail positions in Budapest and highways. With the integration of this network MOL realizes significant wholesale and retail synergies as well as cost optimization.
“The completion of this acquisition further increases the markets for our refineries and ensures additional overall margin capture for our downstream business. The acquisition and integration of around 450 filling station in CEE over the past two years helps us to achieve our strategic goal by 2017, a significant, over 25% fuel volume growth. Additionally, thanks to our regional expansion we are now serving over 1 million customers per day and we intend to increasingly exploit our sales points to serve their changing needs in non-fuel products as well,” says Ferenc Horváth, Downstream Executive VP, MOL Group.
With the acquisition of ENI Hungaria, MOL Group will rebrand the Agip stations to MOL according to the latest standards, including the introduction of the Fresh Corner concept with a special focus on coffee, fresh food, everyday grocery.
“We see a great potential in leveraging the newly acquired Agip selling points in line with our new Retail concept: we envisage to become customers’ obvious choice in fuel and in convenience retailing. To reach this goal our mission is to provide relevant high quality products and services at our service stations to improve the customer experience and make many more people on the move smile and feel welcomed. Driven by this purpose we continuously seek to improve our service level and our offer, developed according to the needs of the modern customer on the move,” also says Lars Höglund, senior vice president of MOL Group Retail.
Over the past two years MOL Group has acquired around 450 service station in Central Eastern Europe and now its retail network reaches over 2,000 units. In 2015, MOL Group completed the acquisition of ENI’s Czech, Slovak and Romanian downstream oil business (with the exclusion of Eni branded lubricant wholesale business), whilst also acquiring LUKOIL’s business activities in the Czech Republic. Most recently, in June 2016, MOL Group also completed the acquisition of ENI’s Slovenian downstream oil business. Through these acquisitions MOL further strengthened its market leader position in Hungary and Slovakia, has become the second largest retail network in the Czech Republic, the third largest in Romania (considering retail sales volumes) and reinforced its position as the third largest provider on the Slovenian market.