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Archana Chaudhary

MUMBAI, June 7

BPCL plans to leverage its `Pure for Sure' brand to enhance its retail presence.

The oil company has laid down ambitious targets of spreading its `PSF' brand to 2,000 retail outlets in the first year of decontrol. It also expects to set up around 400 new outlets in the current fiscal.

"We plan to spread the PSF brand by converting another 700 to 800 retail outlets (ROs) across metros and smaller cities in the coming one year or so," Mr Rajiv Chaturvedi, Executive Director, Bharat Petroleum Corporation, told Business Line. BPCL has converted close to 1,100 outlets out of its network of 4,700 ROs into `Pure for Sure' points which assure pure fuel supply to the customer.

The company is considering the Pure for Sure brand one of its main weapons to beat competition. BPCL decided to introduce the concept of selling pure fuel in the Indian market which was full of suspicions of adulteration, based on a Polish experiment. "The oil market in Poland was similar to the Indian market before decontrol with PSUs' domination and rampant fuel adulteration in certain sections. After decontrol, multinationals such as Shell managed to grab substantial market share from these PSUs by offering pure fuel. We figured, why wait for an MNC or a private company to do that here," Mr Chaturvedi said.

As part of the brand building, the company plans to put in place a certification programme to ensure that the converted ROs keep up the performance. "Every six months or so, the ROs will face surprise tests for fuel and service quality," Mr he said.

Apart from this, BPCL also plans to add close to 400 new outlets to its present network of 4,700 ROs during the year. The oil PSU will have to adhere to a system similar to the former dealer selection system this year, despite sector decontrol. "The Government had earlier approved and advertised for roughly 2,000 marketing sites for all the oil PSUs. These will be cleared during the year and BPC will be assigned about 18 per cent of these. This would mean adding close to 400 new ROs," Mr Chaturvedi said.

Once this backlog is cleared, oil companies would be in a better position to appoint dealers independently, he said.

During the current year, BPCL also has plans to take the number of its Petrocard loyalty card holders to one million from the present 70,000 customers, he added.

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