RIL unfazed by lower offtake by PSU oil firms

Reliance Industries is unfazed at the prospect of a lower offtake of transportation fuels - petrol and diesel - by public sector oil firms from the company's 33 million tonne per annum refinery at Jamnagar in Gujarat.

Anil Ambani, vice chairman and managing director, Reliance Industries, said the company can sell, over a period of time, its entire produce through its retail outlets. However, in the immediate future, it will focus also on exports.

Pointing out that the work on setting up of retail outlets was in full swing, Ambani said, "we have opened up 11 outlets in the western states and about 400 outlets are under construction. We expect about 2,000 outlets at the end of this year".

He claimed that "our outlets are the 21st century retail outlets and the throughput per outlet is minimum double that the existing state-owned retail outlets across the country".

He said that the company has set up four storage terminals for petrol and diesel at Bhopal, Chennai, Haldia and Hazira. Two more terminals are expected by the end of the second quarter of this year.

RIL set up the world's largest greenfield refinery at Jamnagar with a capacity of 27 million tonne which later ramped up the capacity to 33 million tonne through debottlenecking.

The state-owne oil companies have all hiked refining capacity and are planning to utilize this enhanced capacity to sell their products through their expanded retail outlets.

The PSUs have decided to scale down the amount o Reliance's petroleum products through their retail outlets.

As against 11.5 million tonne o petroleum products sold through 20,000 retail outlets across the country in 2003-04, the PSUs have decided to sell only 7.6 million tonne which includes petrol and diesel.