Patriciu crosses the one billion dollar threshold

Rompetrol Group’s turnover last year was in excess of one billion dollars, which brings Dinu Patriciu, company chairman, one step closer to the medium-term goal announced: outrunning SNP (National Oil Company) Petrom by mid next year.
Patriciu told Ziarul Financiar that every unit of the group, except the Petromidia refinery, had made profit. “Petromidia also got closer to profits, because it cut its early-2002 losses in the last few months of the year. It started posting operating income in September,” Patriciu specified.
Rompetrol Group’s revenues audited in line with the International Accounting Standards reached $668 million in 2002, with profits amounting to approximately $15 million. Rompetrol last year sold 25.1% of the business to Austrian oil group OMV, which somehow modified the company’s floatation plans targeting international bourses. “Now that OMV has 25%, such a move is no longer interesting, because we have got other options,” Patriciu explained. Rompetrol’s chairman says he will have all the companies in  the group listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange this year, with the par value per share set at 1,000 ROL.
Two of the group’s companies, Rompetrol Rafinare-Complex Petromidia and Rompetrol SA (created after the Rompetrol Bucharest and Vega Ploiesti Refinery merger) are listed on RASDAQ. Rompetrol Well Services is listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange.
“There will be no more structural changes within Rompetrol, which has come to a logical arrangement; we have drilling companies, processing companies and service companies,” Patriciu said.
The expansion policy of OMV, which has made several acquisitions in Europe (the latest of which is the acquisition of 313 gas stations from BP for $377 million) will be supported, Patriciu says, by Rompetrol, as well, but “at a regional level”, though. At the same time, Rompetrol has finalised its integrated company structure, by engaging in drilling in Romania, too, besides its drilling operations abroad, after having won the tenders organised by the National Mineral Resources Agency for two oil blocks.