The Canadian oil market also faces an unmet, low demand for oil and petroleum. The weak demand is because Canada does not have a large population like in this case of China. China’s large population is one of the factors that influenced Petro-Canada to grab the foreign market investment opportunity.
China has a significantly large market size in the energy sector. This sector has ten major oil-producing companies that compete stiffly to gain consumers’ confidence in their products. These firms include; PTTPE, SGS, Beijing Jinye, Sinochem, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Total, China Sinopec, and BP. Companies such as Sinopec have continuously ranked second on the Fortune 500 List of world companies. This company has a total revenue share of more than 414 billion U.S dollars and is the largest in the world. Its annual production is about 300 million barrels of oil in mainland China and about 50million barrels from overseas crude oil fields. As we mentioned earlier, the Chinese exploration of oil began in the 1950s with very inadequate information and technology. Over the years, China developed the necessary equipment and technical know-how needed to exploit oil. This technological milestone is one of the main competitive advantages it faces in comparison with countries like Canada, who still do not have a reliable pipeline shipment to overseas markets.
Company and Brand analysis
Petro-Canada is a wholesale and retail promoting brand subsidiary of its parent organization, Suncor Energy. This company was previously state-owned by the Canadian government until 1991 when the company merged with Suncor Energy. Its main offices are in Calgary, Canada. Petro-Canada has a collection of outlets that span from downstream to upstream industries in Canada and abroad. It retained the name after distributing ownership shares to all the shareholders of Suncor Energy, who received a sixty percent stake in the merged company and forty percent of the stake to Petro-Canada shareholders[1]. This company retained its brand name in all its overseas markets apart from Labrador and New Found Land. Since then, Petro-Canada became an independent private company until the year 2009 when Suncor Energy announced that it would be purchasing it back with a joint a market share capital of $C 43.3 billion. Suncor energy promised to rebrand all its retail stores in Ontario with the name Petro-Canada name.
Petro –Canada’s market share is quite large due to its dealings in multiple sectors in the economy. Its wholesale and retail outlets are in; fast food, car wash, mobile virtual network, and gas and oil station industries throughout the country. As of 2009, Petro-Canada had clinched the eleventh position and runners up position in the downstream energy sector with interests in large projects in Terra Nova, White Rose, and Hibernia. Petro-Canada became so big that its gas stations were present in almost all cities in Canada; The Company also owned several refineries in Montreal and Edmonton, which presently account for more than 20% of the total refined production in Canada. After the merger in 2009, Suncor Energy took control of these assets.
[1]Kucher, Oleg, TarasHutsol, KaterynaZavalniuk, YuriiPantsyr, IhorHarasymchuk, Krzysztof Mudryk, and MarcinJewiarz. “Marketing strategies and prognoses of development of the Renewable Energy market in Ukraine.”Traicon SC, 2017.