OMV to open self-service petrol stations in Hungary

OMV is planning to expand on the Hungarian market by opening self-service petrol stations without employees and shops but offering fuel for a lower price in Western-Hungary.

Lower fuel prices, less time

The Austrian OMV-group is to open new discount gas stations in some of the neighbouring countries of Austria including Hungary – today’s Világgazdaság, a Hungarian economic daily, said – reported hvg.hu.

They would like to expand in Southern-Germany and Slovenia and also in Austria in places where they can supply petrol stations with fuel produced by the company. In the case of Hungary, taking into consideration that OMV’s oil refinery of Schwechat is very close to the country’s Transdanubia region, they would probably like to open new stations in the Western counties – the daily speculates.

Such discount units operate without employees or shops, therefore, the process of

refuelling takes less time, and they can offer the fuel for a reduced price.

In fact, OMV has already 220 such stations in Austria. Furthermore, OMV’s Avanti petrol stations function also in a discount system, the pumps operated by FE-Trading is 100 pc owned by OMV and Petrom stations also offer a lower price.

If OMV is to follow its Austrian practice, they can use their 21 Avanti stations in Hungary or expand the cooperation with Aldi they started the previous year. Thanks to the latter, Aldi self-service units of Budaörs, Szigetszentmiklós and Sopron already distribute two of OMV’s products for a reduced price.

Does the future belong to electric cars?

OMV Hungaria Ltd. said to Világgazdaság that planned developments regarding the

expansion with discount stations in the Hungarian market

are totally independent of the Hungarian subsidiary and are supervised by the centre of the Austrian parent company itself.

In fact, OMV has 2,000 petrol stations in 10 countries, of which 197 are in Hungary.

And since we wrote about innovation above, we reported before in February that National Utilities Ltd. (Nemzeti Közművek) is aiming to establish so many charging stations that

within 1.5 years, people will be able to drive across Hungary with their electric cars.

In order to achieve this goal, NKM is making huge investments and is partnering up with several other companies.

In fact, they are currently operating 100 public charging stations in Hungary, 10 pc of which are so-called fast chargers. According to the plans, the company will build chargers every 80-100 km, mostly along highways. Hungary is going to receive three ultra-fast chargers: one in Budapest, one near Győr and one near Nagykanizsa. At the moment, chargers with the highest capacity in Hungary are around 50 kW, while these new chargers will start at 150 kW.

However, the bad news is that in July National Utilities Ltd. announced that they had decided to end the practice of charging electric cars for free.

Source: hvg.hu