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Profits of Seaoil Philippines, Inc. last year may hit
five times more than what it earned in the previous year on the back
of strong sales, a ranking official of the company said.
Francis Glenn Yu, Seaoil
president, told reporters that the company’s net income for 2007
may reach P150 million, up by about five-fold of the company’s
2006 earnings.
“The basic growth driver is a
combination of operational efficiencies and increase in volume,”
Yu added.
Formed in 1997, Seaoil is the
first independent fuel company to put up a gasoline retail station,
following the deregulation of the country’s downstream oil
industry.
It has since aggressively
expanded, becoming the largest fuel firm outside the Big 3 of Petron,
Shell and Chevron (Caltex) with more than 150 outlets nationwide.
Yu said the company will pursue
the expansion of its local operations even more aggressively this
year, beginning with its planned maiden offering at the stock
exchange in the first quarter.
“We target to expand by another
126 stations for the year, of which 43 of the total number of
expansion stations are in various stages of construction,” he
said.
However, if the planned public
listing would prove to be ill timed, Yu said Seaoil would pursue
other capital-raising activities, which he did not specify, to fund
its expansion programs.
In 2005, two years before the
implementation of the Biofuels Act, Seaoil offered the first
10-percent ethanol-blended gasoline or E10, now available in most of
its nationwide retail station network along with the similarly
mandated 1-percent biodiesel blend.
--Euan Paulo C. Añonuevo
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