API confirms interest in buying Shell's Italian fuel retail network

API, owner of the Falconara refinery on Italy’s Adriatic coast, has expressed interest in buying Shell’s Italian fuel retail network, which the Anglo-Dutch major aims to sell this year.
Shell owns 870 service stations in Italy, mainly in the northern part of the country, and has a market share of under 5%, making the company Italy’s seventh largest fuel retailer, according to estimates by Datamonitor.
Sardinia-based Saras and Italy’s Erg have also expressed interest in Shell’s retail network, according to a report in trade paper Staffetta Quotidiana, although Staffetta said that Saras has pulled out of the bidding.
Shell has combined its Italian retail fuel business, its marine business, and its aviation fuels and general storage activities into a separate unbranded unit in preparation for the sale, which is expected to occur before October 2013, according to the divestiture plan trade unions were presented with by the company earlier this year.
It is keeping its non-service station lubricants business, its Basilicata extraction activities and its Italian gas unit.
The divestitures will involve approximately 180 employees working in the businesses being sold, union sources said.
Shell’s move comes after it announced plans in 2009 to exit from 15% of its worldwide refining capacity and 35% of its retail markets due to falling global refining margins and waning demand for fuel in Europe.
Since then, it sold its refining and marketing businesses in Finland and Sweden in 2010, as well as the majority of its shareholding in most of its downstream businesses in Africa in 2011.
(July 16, 2013)