by Adedayo Ademuwagun
Some petrol stations in Lagos now sell petrol at N87/litre in line with the federal government’s recent directive. This especially includes the major petrol stations such as Total.
A manager at one Total station says, “Immediately the government announced the new price, we got the call from our head office to change the price accordingly. So we now sell at N87 at all our branches.”
Some independent stations, however, still sell at N97. They say they’ve not been directed by the headquarters to revise. But people already know about the new price and when they get to a station that still sells at the old price, they ask questions.
Dayo is a manager at a Global World station, an independent marketer. He says, “Already some of our customers who came this morning complained that we still sell at the old price. Some people didn’t buy from us because it appears some stations elsewhere already sell for N87. So we’ll have to bring our own price down too since others are doing it and we need to stay competitive or we’ll lose our customers. We’re working on it. We should be selling at N87 by end of the week.”
“We can’t reprice right away because we need to get the instruction from our MD. Besides we still have unsold supply from last week and we probably need to sell those off, and then we cam adjust when we get new supply at lower pricing.”
Some of the independent stations are adjusting already. This morning one station had engineers at their machines retooling them to refix the price.
“We just received two truckload of fuel last week at the former price and we still have over 60,000 litres left. If we take N10 off those litres, then we’ll have lost N6 million. They’ve not started loading to those of us independent marketers at the new price. So customers should consider this and understand that we need to dispense with the supply from last week.”
