RECORDER REPORT
KARACHI (December 02 2006): Sales volume of the overall OMC (Oil Marketing Companies) sector rose by 18 percent to 5.595 million tons during the first four months of the current fiscal year (July-October 2006) from 4.755 million tons during the corresponding period of last year.
However, sales during October 2006 fell by 5 percent when compared to the previous month of September 2006 as they stood at 1.31 million tons from 1.373 tons previously. Jawad Haleem, an analyst at Atlas Capital Market said that a somewhat mixed trend was seen when looking at the company wise sale break-up during the 4-month period.
Volumes by PSO and APL rose to 32 percent and 16 percent to 3.671 million tons and 409000 tons respectively, whereas sales of Shell fell by 17 percent year-on-year to 793000 tons. However, sales of all these companies fell on month-on-month basis whereby PSO, Shell and APL witnessed a fall of 5.7 percent, 6.3 percent and 34 percent to 869000 tons, 181000 tons and 74000 tons respectively.
A product-wise comparison of the industry shows that Fuel Oil (FO) and Light Diesel Oil (LDO) sales surged by 76 percent and 7 percent respectively, out of which PSO contributed the most to the former and APL to the latter while those of Motor Spirit, HSD, JP-1 and kerosene fell by 7 percent, 6 percent, 5 percent and 4 percent respectively.
PSO managed to attain the largest in terms of market share as its share rose to 66 percent, up 7.1 percentage points (pps) over 59 percent recorded during the period of four months of FY2006. Shell's market share fell by 5.9 pps to 14 percent as against 20 percent previously, whereas APL saw a 0.1 pps decline to 7.3 percent. This was a surprising change as after a significant gain in market share over the past six months, it all of a sudden fell by 2.5 pps in October to 5.6 percent. The reason for this decline was the aggressive sales made by other new entrants such as Admore, Hascombe and Overseas Oil Trading Company.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2006