The energy company that is growing the most in Europe is Spanish, but it does not install windmills or solar panels: it sells low-cost fuel. It is Petroprix, founded in Martos (Jaén) in 2013, and has just been included by the Financial Times in the ranking of the 300 European companies with the highest growth in the last decade (with data until 2023).
In that list, prepared for the first time by the prestigious British newspaper together with Statista, Petroprix occupies seventh position, with an annual growth rate of 83.2%. The Spanish tourism website Traventia (eleventh) also stands out on the list and well-known companies such as Zalando or Spotify appear.
The company from Jaen operates its network 100%, without resorting to the standard-bearer or franchisee model. It is a national leader in the automatic gas station market (without employees). Its small service stations, many of them located in industrial estates, usually occupy the top positions in the rankings for the cheapest fuel in many provinces.
With family capital, the company is controlled by the founder, Manuel Santiago, along with his brothers and his ex-wife, María José Jiménez, also founder and very active lately in the world of venture capital.
Santiago, a telecommunications engineer, had spent half his life working for multinationals (Valeo, General Electric) until in 2005 he decided to bet on clean energy through Avansolar engineering. But, he remembers on the phone, “they changed the laws and took our business away.” After trying his luck in cogeneration and another regulatory change in 2011, he had to rethink his course again.
At that time, in Barcelona, where he lived at the time, a gas station with unanswered calls caught his attention and it was clear to him: “We saw the market trend, we tried it and it has proven to be a business with a lot of interest for customers.”
Probably not even he himself foresaw the sales growth that the company was going to have, especially in recent years. If at the beginning of 2020 the group set the goal of reach 300 million turnover in two yearsin 2021 the turnover already reached 360 million. In 2022, year one of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it doubled to 700 million. The inflation crisis of recent years has “accelerated” the trend for a citizen “who needs to save and move to work; In the end it is a basic product that we have made accessible to the public.”
This year, Petroprix expects to close with a new turnover record of around 800 million, compared to 747 million in 2023. For 2025, everything will depend on the average final sales price, but its goal is to reach 1,000 million. Currently, they have 160 service stations open in Spain and they hope to close the year with around 166.
By 2025 they want to open another 20 “organically” in Spain, but they are open to purchases to reach around 200. To put the figures in context, in Spain there are more than 12,000 gas stations. Its two main rivals in the ‘low cost’ segment, Plenoil and Ballenoil, are around 270. Petroprix wants to see how to integrate “upwards, something that no other ‘low cost’ has, to achieve a little more margin”, with the acquisition of an operator in the wholesale market.
Santiago describes the 2024 fiscal year as “atypical,” in which margins have suffered due to massive fraud in the hydrocarbon sector that “has given an advantage to some people who have been buying from suppliers who committed fraud at a low price.” But next year “they will not have that advantage” and they will look at the opportunities that will open up. The executive says that the fraud “is ending now,” after the Treasury has intervened in many companies in the sector. And he hopes that the change that is going to come into force in the VAT law will eradicate a practice that “is still possible today.”
Plenoil was acquired at the beginning of the year by the Portobello and Tensile funds, while Ballenoil has passed into the hands of Moeve, the former Cepsa, but Petroprix is not considering an operation of this type or giving entry to third parties in its capital: “We are very focused on international growth” and “this is not the time to waste time on a corporate operation,” something that “is very distracting,” according to its chief executive.
In January they began their internationalization with the first gas station in Portugal. There they hope to have 50 in operation by 2026. They are building service stations in Panama and Chile and are preparing to land in another European country. “This is not the time to think about selling the company or bringing in partners, we are working very well from a profitability point of view,” he says.
Electrostations without business
The company has signed agreements with the Portuguese EdP and Emovili for the installation of rapid charging points for electric vehicles at their gas stations. It currently has about 70-80 chargers between the two companies. But “today there is no big business behind it” and “it is more of a long-term positioning”, given that sales of electric vehicles are not taking off. “We are cautious and would like to see a little more dough before making our own investments.” That’s why they’re turning to partners.
Petroprix was founded at a time when more competition was beginning to open up in a market that, according to its CEO, “tends to be monopolistic.” Santiago has a smile on the other end of the phone when he remembers how in those years warnings from traditional operators proliferated about the danger of so-called “unattended” gas stations, or the job destruction they would cause.
While the CNMC urged the automatic gas stations to be energized, several autonomous communities tried to force them to have staff. “It was the European Commission that ruled that these regulations were contrary to European law.”
Another of the “myths” that they have debunked, fueled “by the big oil companies,” was that the fuel they sold was not of the same quality as that of traditional operators. “There were many people who were reluctant,” but “it has been dismantled over the years”: the European fuel regulations “are super strict” in regulating the characteristics that the product that reaches the pumps, which the vast majority buy, must have. to the large oil companies with refining capacity in Spain.
10 years later, “the model is fully consolidated, the public has accepted it and we are part of the Spanish fuel distribution ecosystem.” There have also been “no serious incidents” at those gas stations without employees. Administrative obstacles do persist at the local level, with some town councils “that make your life impossible or impose processing deadlines of four years.”
The group in total has about 370 employees. About 300 correspond to Petroprix and the rest is distributed among the car insurance subsidiary (Hello Auto), the payment solutions subsidiary (Wipay) and the structure that supports different areas. The management is carried out from Madrid, but in Martos there are around 150 people.
“It is the fastest growing area of Jaén,” emphasizes Santiago. In fact, in August the Cotec Foundation pointed out to this town of nearly 25,000 inhabitants, based on the analysis of data from Social Security affiliates, as the second small city in Spain (between 10,001 and 50,000 inhabitants) with the highest percentage of technological employment, 39.1%, only behind Beasáin (Guipúzcoa), headquarters of companies such as the train manufacturer CAF.
In the case of Martos, the data is explained by a drag effect of the plant that the French multinational Valeo has there and contrasts with the decline that the nearby Linares, former headquarters of the defunct Santana Motor, has suffered in recent decades. The town of Jaén can now boast of having a representative with a prominent place in the pages of the world’s leading financial newspaper.
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