Growing Bigger & Better
India’s First oil marketing firm that was formed over a century and a half ago, albeit in another avatar, remains the country’s best petroleum company — as far as the market perception goes. Renamed as Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) about half a century ago, the company has not only sustained growth but also tried constant innovation in its business model to excel in the challenging market scenario.
The Businessworld-IPSOS annual survey for India’s most respected companies on various criteria, including innovation, management quality, financial performance and shareholder return, product/service quality, people practices, global competitiveness, and ethics and transparency, has ranked BPCL in the top ten, across sectors. The Corporation also came at the top in the country’s oil and gas sector.
In its journey, 1928 was a landmark year as the Burmah-Shell Oil Storage and Distributing Company of India Ltd began importing and selling kerosene in India.
BPCL is currently the country’s second largest oil and gas marketing company. Bharat Petroleum Corporation has recently once again delivered spectacular results (in March) with a net profit of Rs 8,040 crore on a revenue of Rs 2,42,048 crore.
BPCL, which is also India’s first oil refiner to process the newly found indigenous crude from Bombay High reserve, soon after its transformation from Burma Shell, post Government of India takeover in 1976, became one of the country’s ‘Maharatna’ public sector units in 2016.
Grown into a much larger organisation now with over at least a dozen subsidiaries and many joint ventures, the Corporation’s current move is to leverage its widely expanded group strength to become competitive in the global market both financially and in capabilities. This will be the focus of the Corporation both externally and internally.
“Going forward, finance function will have a major role to play in strengthening the four pillars of a business i.e. people, technology, infrastructure and safety. Constant
innovation and sustained excellence in operational, technical and financial spheres is imperative for survival of business in today’s world,” said D. Rajkumar, chairman and managing director, BPCL, while talking at one of its corporate forums recently.
BPCL is also a key part of an industry collaboration, which was mooted early this year.
Even as the government has now made a larger consolidation call in the country’s oil and gas sector aiming at creating globally competitive Indian petroleum giants, each of these PSUs, including BPCL, is also individually targeting bigger goals simultaneously.
As part of this, BPCL also plans to invest heavily in infrastructure related projects in the coming years, to support the growing energy demand in the Indian economy, which is poised to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
