Technological Innovation is Driving our Strategy – Umar

Innovations in technology led to success stories that have made TotalEnergies Marketing Nigeria Plc. a sustainable and more efficient company. This was confirmed by the the General Manager, Retails & Card, TotalEnergies Marketing Nigeria Plc. Abdullahi Umar on Wednesday, February 28, 2024, at the ongoing 7th Nigeria International Energy Summit, NIES taking place at the International Conference Center, Abuja.

Mr. Umar sat in place of the Managing Director, Dr. Samba Seye on a panel session for Nigeria Energy Downstream Forum. The theme was Borderless Energy Market and Investment Frontiers in Downstream.

“Today, we are making a huge investment in renewables and solar. The landscape is changing. In Nigeria, the cost of energy has doubled, and people are looking for value for their money. So, we came up with a very robust card system. We have a very good spread of over 525 stations across the country. Technological innovation has been at the forefront of our trajectory. Everything we do today is to meet our customer expectations.”

He gave an example of another tool that station and site managers can access online to check the location of any dispatched truck. “This has helped us to know the level of efficiency of our truck deployment, behaviour of drivers, timely delivery, etc. Our stations are complete one-stop shopping centers. We are completely innovating and improving as our customers’ demand, and we are leveraging innovation.”

Reacting to the present realities of pricing of products at the stations, Mr. Umar said: “If you look at this industry 25 years ago, most of the players were multinationals. Today, they’ve all ran away leaving only TotalEnergies. What I am saying is it is a very difficult terrain to operate in.”

Expressing opinion on solutions to petroleum product availability and pricing, he said: “The only solution that can make things easy for customers is as we’ve all discussed - local refining. If we can push the crude, get it to the refineries, move the products to our stations, the prices that you are talking about will go down.”

Explaining further, the GM, stated: “But today, what is the refining capacity? How much of this product will be able to meet the needs of our customers? Majority of the products we sell in our retails stations today are imported by the government and everybody understands the pricing structure when you import. Nobody can sit on this panel today to say I am going to cut down my cost. It is about cost and margins. We have to definitely generate revenues to meet with our responsibilities. Overall, our most important satisfaction is that we are providing values to our customers.”