Hungarian oil and gas company MOL Nyrt. said Friday that the
acquisition of a 100% stake in Italy's IES was completed Nov. 15, 2007.
IES is an Italian refining and marketing company, which owns
and operates the Mantova refinery with a capacity of 2.6 million metric
tons per year, the related wide scale logistic assets and a network of
165 retail stations.
The refinery is a reliable and well-run facility with its
production focused on the highly demanded middle distillates. Major
advantages of the facility are its inland market location - in the
middle of a well developed industrialized region - and its wide-scale
logistic support for supply and marketing.
MOL intends to leverage its refining knowledge and expertise
in order to deliver further efficiency gains at the company and to
execute further developments at the refinery.
By purchasing IES, MOL enters into a new market (North
Italy) - increasing geographical diversity - adjacent to its current
focus areas of Croatia, Austria and Slovenia.
Thus it can serve as a basis to build a strong presence in
the highly developed industrial North Italian region and also a stable
base to investigate further expansion toward the Mediterranean and
South Europe.
In the long run it can provide significant upside potential by exploiting synergies with MOL's current asset base.