Today we signed an agreement with Grupa Lotos to form a new joint venture to manage the supply, logistics and marketing of aviation fuel in Poland, the country with the fastest growing aviation fuel sales in Europe.

Through the new joint venture, called “Lotos – Air BP Polska”, we will be establishing a significant presence in Poland and looking to grow aviation fuel sales to our commercial airline and general aviation customers.

At the signing ceremony and press conference held this afternoon, David Gilmour said: “Air BP’s strategy is to grow our business through superior customer offers, partnerships and advantaged supply infrastructure. Through our new joint venture with Grupa Lotos we are delivering this strategy in Poland. We will leverage Air BP’s global customer relationships and technical operations experience, as well as Lotos’ local expertise and supply capability, to establish and significantly grow our presence in Poland.”

Alex Junge added: “We will now be able to provide our commercial airline customers with aviation fuel through our joint venture when they fly to Poland. And we will expand our general aviation network by enabling customers to use their Air BP Sterling card at all the new joint venture locations. It’s a great example of our strategy in action and shows that business growth opportunities do exist in Europe!”

Lotos – a strong local partner
We are forming the Lotos – Air BP Polska joint venture by buying 50 percent of Lotos Tank, the wholly owned aviation subsidiary of Grupa Lotos. This will make BP and Lotos equal shareholders in the company with both parties bringing valuable strengths and expertise. We expect the deal to be completed in the next six to eight weeks, subject to competition authority approval.

Grupa Lotos has a refinery in Gdansk and is the largest aviation fuels manufacturer in Poland. Lotos Tank currently has licenses to operate at Gdansk, Warsaw and Krakow airports and also supplies bulk fuel to Wroclaw and Rzeszow airports. Since starting into plane sales in 2009 they have steadily grown, leveraging their strong local relationships and brand.

Start-up of safe and reliable operations
There will be no change to Lotos’ existing on-airfield operations and supply agreements on formation of the new joint venture. The only change will be to the name of the company, which will become Lotos – Air BP Polska to reflect the change in ownership and be clear that it is now a joint venture. The next step will be to get all of the back office systems and processes updated. We are then looking to grow the joint venture further and start operating out of more airport locations in Poland.

As always our top priority is going to be managing safe and reliable operations. We will share our technical knowledge to assist the joint venture to operate to industry standards and to ensure that everyone who works at the airport locations stays safe. To help us do this we will be appointing a Managing Director for Operations who will be seconded from Air BP into the joint venture. This role will be posted on the TAS system today.

Identifying new opportunities to grow the Air BP business is one of our strategic priorities. We have made a great step forward with our growth agenda in Europe with this deal. A big thank you to everyone who has been involved in this project. It’s been a big team effort involving lots of people from NCE PU, the global functions and BP Poland.