ECONOMICS - November 24th 2004 The Hungarian petrol group MOL will integrally take over the shares of Shell Romania SC, which controls 59 carburant distribution stations in the Romanian market. ADRIAN N. IONESCU

APPETITE. MOL bosses, Slavomir Jankovic and Gyorgy Masonyi, say that the fight with OMV is just beginning MOL (Hungary) bought the Shell Romania Ltd. stocks, owned by Royal Dutch Shell, which kept the shares owned at Shell Gas Romania SC where it is co-share holder with Petrom. After the transaction, which the analysts estimated to be around 70 million USD, a 59 gas station network will be owned by MOL, which will rise this way to 130 stations, 23 of which recently bought also from Shell.

Together with the acquisition of the Shell Romania shares MOL also bought the deal regarding the lubricants and carburant for planes distribution. The Hungarian officials wanted to assure its new clients that will continue on benefiting from the programs Shell initiated, including the card ones.

EXPANSION. The Hungarian re-establishes its position in the South-East European market after it lost the competition for the Petrom acquisition in favour of its main competitor, OMV. In Romania, MOL is on the second place from the oil products volume point of view and on the fourth place regarding the network dimension, after Petrom-OMV, Lukoil and Rompetrol, says Gyorgy Mosonyi, the group’s executive director. "As a result of the acquisition we hold between 11.5% and 12% of the sales", says the Hungarian official.

"We are still hungry for acquisitions and development", stated Slavomir Jankovic, leader of the group’s "SOUTH Region" division, which includes Austria, Romania and the former Yugoslavian area. Romania is interesting not only because of the market’s dimension, but also because of the perspective of carburant prices’ incr