While undertaking a regional aviation fuels consultancy recently, I came across a single oil marketer in Kenya with as much as 66 percent of total jet fuel sales, according to statistics from Petroleum Institute of East Africa (PIEA). For comparison, I also checked jet fuel sales of the two largest multinational marketers, and each had about 2.5 percent market share. When traditional kings of the industry are hardly selling Jet fuel, then there must be something amiss.
And we are talking of 66 percent of total annual jet fuel sales of about 800,000 cubic meters(M3) which is roughly 14 percent of all petroleum imported into Kenya annually. This is what competition experts would call risky market concentration.
