Narayan Bhatra, EET CEO Retail, talks with Claudia Weeks, Fuel Oil News Community Content Lead, about the business, its goals and ambitions and its strategies for expansion of its retail offering.
EET Retail, the retail division of EET Fuels, appointed Narayan Bhatra as Chief Executive Officer earlier this year. Narayan was previously Chief Retail Officer at Nayara Energy, India’s second largest oil and gas company and its fastest growing private fuel station network. Narayan has over three decades of experience in the energy sector, including leadership roles with Essar and Reliance Industries across India and Africa.
EET Retail has plans to develop a significant portfolio of Essar-branded fuel retail outlets within three years, as part of its vision to become the UK’s “retailer of choice to consumers”. The plans include developing a pan-UK presence and a network of outlets across all regions and markets, including identifying acquisition opportunities to accelerate growth.
The stated ambition of EET Retail is to transform its retail businesses with a customer-centric approach of ‘Driving Community Convenience’ – serving the continuously evolving fuelling and convenience needs of local communities and motorists where their sites are a hub. Narayan explained more about the plans.
What is the ambition for EET Retail?
EET Retail has been formed to add value. We’ve been in the retail business for over ten years, but as an evolving player, and we have been analysing the right time to impact and scale up on the retail side of the business.
Now, the vision is to grow this network to a sizeable presence. It will take time, but we have the ambition. The vision is to not only add value in the refinery supply chain but to also be ready for future unique opportunities presented by the energy transition.
We will focus on delivering community driven outlets. In the coming years, fuel and convenience will be our strength, and we will incorporate future fuels and energy at an appropriate stage of our business evolution.
Narayan, you joined EET in April 2024, please share your background prior to this.
I am a seasoned business leader in the oil and energy sector, with over thirty years of experience driving strategic retail growth initiatives, developing innovative and market-effective strategies, and managing complex and large-scale retail and institutional businesses.
My career has spanned several areas including project management, handling large projects with refineries and petrochemicals. I’ve spent time in corporate planning, been an oil trader, worked on the business-to-business side. In my time at Reliance Industries Ltd, I was involved in strategy planning and new product launches. I also had a brief stint in East Africa mandated to grow the company’s trading business.
Before joining EET, I was heading up the retail side of one of India’s largest private oil and gas networks. We were operating 6,500 outlets, with another 1,500 in the pipeline under various stages of commissioning and construction. I was instrumental in high grading of the network, introduced digitisation and the value proposition to gain market share and SSG with a strong team of 650 plus.
I had been working in retail in India for almost a decade – experience that is beneficial to my new role. EET wants to grow at a fast pace, and I am well placed to support that – albeit the scale, complexities and markets are different. It is what has excited me about taking on this role.
In India’s retail landscape, the convenience side of forecourts is still very much in a development phase. I did some pilots that gave us great results in India, and I was then keen to explore a market that was more developed on the convenience side, like the UK. I wanted to see if I could add value to EET using my previous experiences.
Has the role been as you expected?
As the Chief Executive Officer at EET Retail, I lead the enterprise retail business as part of the EET group with a mandate to grow and add significant presence to the UK landscape of Retail, Mobility and Convenience backed by the game changing sustainability agenda at EET Fuels, Stanlow UK.
My mission is to significantly scale up the retail business in the next five years, enhance the market share and effectiveness by more than 10 times and create value by upgrading and enhancing better value propositions for customers, partners, and stakeholders. I also aim to make the current business future-ready by exploring new product and business segments, such as biofuels and EVs, that align with the game changing sustainability goals of EET in the UK.
I am settling well, and I don’t feel there have been any surprises with the job – it is as I expected. The present scale is small, it feels almost like working for a start-up. It has taken more time than I thought to establish a structure, but now things are falling in line.
I’ve spent my first few months reviewing the market, meeting with people and forging a strong team, which was my first job, and a good structure.
We have three vertical teams – a business development team, an operations team and a convenience team along with a strong support system including our Global Capability Centre (GCC). We have ambitious plans for expansion, which will be driven by the business development team, with the operations team focussed on operational excellence. I’m pleased to say that we are already seeing development and progress.
What are the key developments from 2024, and what do you hope to achieve in 2025?
The key plans for 2024, were to strengthen our internal systems and processes. We want a strong connection with the market and our team are spending a lot of time meeting people and understanding what is happening in the industry. In term of operations, we are looking to modernise our systems, bringing in more automation and more technology. Those things have been initiated. We have been working on expanding and have some exciting announcements to make soon.
We have now successfully formed the organisation, established the team expectation, aligned the stakeholders with the vision of what we are trying to achieve, and put all the resources in place ready for 2025.
EET has ambitious plans, how will the retail business develop?
In terms of retail, there are few differences between forecourt brands. When you go to a forecourt, they are all very similar. The value proposition, in terms of customer perception, is what makes the difference. A community feel makes a difference.
On the convenience side we are building long-term partnerships with aligned values. We want to engage three, four or even five partners to support our offering. When we acquire a new retail outlet, we will do a profile of the local demographic to understand the customer profile and behaviour. We want to bring unique value propositions.
We are looking at the right partners to add value to our offerings. We will offer all partners, operators, landlords, collaborators, something that is unique. We are offering a long-term lease model and a sustainable income for the partner. This will help us to grow and is a robust model – it’s a win/win for everybody.
Recently, one of our signature outlets won an award for having the best kept toilet in the whole of the UK. I’m highlighting this award because this is something that matters to customers. It’s a need of customers who are travelling. Toilets that are broken, unhygienic, unpleasant, are a negative experience for the customer. These things matter to people. We of course also won the best forecourt in Northern England over 4 MLPA category. This establishes the strength of the value proposition we have to take forward as we expand.
Perception of safety, well-stocked convenience, additional services such as a car wash, jet washes, etc all add value to the business and to the customer. We also want to bring biofuels to our network. EET is planning for the expansion of sustainable energy – and we will migrate in that direction.
What are your thoughts on future volumes of traditional fuels as well as the trajectories for renewable liquid fuels, EV charging demand and even hydrogen refuelling?
People tell me I’m biased towards hydrocarbons because I’ve been in this industry for a long time, but I’m not biased – I’m realistic. We have had many conversations about the future of fuel, the changes ahead and timescales. The consensus is that growth will happen with alternative fuel. We need to know when the government will deliver clear support for these changes. We need to make this happen.
I feel that positive change is happening, and Stanlow is leading the way. The ban on new diesel and petrol cars has been pushed back to 2035. However, the average age of vehicles in the UK is nine years or so, when we reach 2035, even with no new diesel or petrol cars, there will still be a need for traditional forecourts for another ten years.
The transition will happen on the biofuel side. My view is optimistic; we will still have a need for traditional fuels for years, but we also need to see regulatory and fiscal support for a mobility transition.
The network profile of the UK gives us the opportunity to provide EV chargers in a short timescale too. The challenge, in many countries, is having the space in forecourts for EV charging but, in the UK, because many forecourts offer convenience outlets with designated parking for that purpose, the space is available for the addition of EV outlets.
While we are growing our footprint, we are looking at retail sites whose size will enable us to fit in EV charging at scale. We know that there will be a time when EV is a value proposition for all our customers.
We are currently in the process of adding EV charging to two of our outlets as pilot schemes. Adding EV chargers can be costly and time-consuming and there isn’t as much demand as there is for petrol and diesel. We will monitor this closely and will be ready, as a network, to rapidly roll out EV charging.
EET continues to grow – how many people are currently involved within EET Retail?
We currently have a team of 30 people in EET Retail, and plan to add more resources to complete our first phase team formation. That doesn’t include all the contractors, and third-party persons.
We see networks in the UK that are operating with over 200 outlets, that don’t have a team this large. We have been aggressive with putting in place a large team, the right team, and with that, we plan to grow accordingly. We want to cover the whole of the UK, and there will be four teams in place as part of a regional structure.
How important is the EET Retail brand to the end user?
I feel that this is a journey. In India, I was responsible for a huge number of outlets, and we went through a rebranding process. We converted 3,500 outlets to a new brand. It wasn’t just a case of changing the colours, it was changing the value proposition of the outlets.
It was a difficult journey, but an interesting one. Coming from that background, the challenge of EET has been interesting for me. I know that the Essar/EET brand is positively accepted by customers.
Through conversations with industry players, my peers and competitors, I know that EET’s retail brand Essar-branded forecourts are liked and well-respected. As we scale, it will increase our visibility and our brand awareness. As we grow, and bring in excellent retail outlets, we need signature forecourts to showcase the best of what we do.
I met someone in London recently, from the fintech space. He had been to our flagship site at Lea Gate, Preston and was incredibly complimentary about it. Once people start seeing the presence of the brand, then the impression of the brand will increase.
We want to create a niche for our brand and our network which will be different from others. We’re not 100% sure exactly what this is yet, but we want our forecourts to be clean, to have a high standard of health and safety, to have monthly audits. We believe that monthly, soft, internal audits are extremely important. We want to upgrade the standard across all sites, physical presence, hygiene, etc. and remind our employees that anyone customer facing is a brand ambassador.
Tell us about your drive for sustainability.
We encourage all our outlets to have an awareness of sustainability, to know how much energy they are consuming, what packaging they are using, how much they are recycling, etc. We want to partner with them to ensure that this is happening.
The drive for sustainable processes starts at the refinery and will feed right down to the forecourts. Our partners will have a huge part to play in this, we need partners that have strong sustainable values.
Over the next few years, what do you see as the major challenges to the fuel industry and what are the positives?
This market can be a challenging one and finding the right deals takes time. There are still a lot of unorganised players in the network that can add challenges too. There will be consolidation in the market and there are marginal players in the industry. However, I feel it gives us opportunities, as a large organisation, to support them and partner with them.
What are the things that keep you awake at night?
When we dream something which seems impossible it does create a situation where you lose sleep literally. However, I and my team all aligned to create a paradigm shift in the industry and the excitement to create something unique and sustainable is a great feeling.
On a personal level, the weather has been a huge change and has taken some getting used to! In November, for the first time in my life, I experienced snow! I had snow on my car, and it was amazing – such a novelty!
Overall, I do get a good night’s sleep. If you do your work and know where you want to go in life, then you don’t lose sleep. When your work becomes your passion, you enjoy doing it.
What do you enjoy most about operating in the retail and fuel industry?
There is never any lack of excitement. It’s a very exciting space, it’s a consumer facing space, it’s competitive, there is a lot going on with pricing, economics, technology.
I must say we are planning lots on the technology front, including using AI. We are doing some pilots on ways to enhance our offerings. It gives me energy.
What was the best piece of advice you have been given in this industry?
Make things simple and we can achieve the impossible. Believe in yourself and believe in your team! When I took on my role in India, I had no retail experience, but I was keen to learn. In my first few months, people told me that things weren’t possible, and I couldn’t do it but in those five years, we grew the network 5X – we improved everything.
If we believe it, we can do it!
User