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Oil and gas company Petrom has decided to outsource some of its equipment maintenance activities to CDI Oilfields Services, the local branch of British industrial group Smiths. By taking this measure the company is reducing its total number of employees by 270. Last year, Petrom had a staff of some 27,000, far fewer than the over 50,000 who worked for the company in 2004, at the time of the privatization to Austria’s OMV. CDI Oilfields Services had a business value of EUR 16 million in 2008 and 20 employees.
The Romanian energy company also made use of outsourcing in order to reduce costs in 2008, when it delegated its Petrobrazi maintenance activity to Siemens. Moreover, the firm recently announced that it had decided to rebadge its PetromV filling stations, almost five years after the launch of the PetromV brand. The move could have been inspired by the cost-cutting resulting from reducing the number of managed brands.
“All the 124 PetromV stations will be turned either into OMV or Petrom filling stations by yearend,” said Petrom representatives. According to company data, some EUR 1-1.2 million is invested in the transformation of a regular gas station into a PetromV filling station.
Currently, Petrom’s portfolio numbers 550 filling stations, out of which 77 are OMV and 124 are PetromV.
Dana Ciuraru