Yetebaberut Beherawi Petroleum S.C. (YBP) reported an over 3.7 million Br profit for the 2008/09 fiscal year on Thursday, December 24, 2009; the report came at the fifth annual general assembly, which took place at the Hilton Hotel.

"The power constraints during the reported period have somehow affected our activities, contributing to sale drops while hampering the flow of our working capital," Tsega Asamere, chairperson of the board of directors said.

That the power outage had affected the consumption of its large customers, such as Muger Cement Factory, Tsega says.

"Our larger clients had to interrupt operations or operated only partially because of the power cut, and, as a result, were unable to settle payments on time," he said.

Nevertheless, the company had a total sale of 1.72 billion Br from 246.3 million litres of fuel and 780,000 litres of lubricants, from which it made a gross profit of 16.9 million Br and paid 2.24 million Br in profit tax to the government.

Muger Cement had been buying 82 million litres of furnace fuel annually under normal operations, Desalegn Alemayehu, managing director of YBP told Fortune. Another large client is Kombolcha Textile Factory.

YBP made a deal with EEPCO to supply petroleum product for three district including Dire Dawa. However, their deal was interrupted after six month upon completion of the Dire Dawa project due to YBPs lack of capacity

His company plans to gradually increase its capital from the current 36.3 million Br to 100 million Br in five years, he said.

The company will not be able to go far by relying only on fuel and fuel products, said Tsega. He added that there was a plan to start supplying gas, jet fuel, asphalt, chemicals, car tires and batteries as well.

YBP now wants to turn its attention to urban areas, where 40pc to 50pc of the market is, Desalegn added. The company had started out by investing outside urban areas.

It is now erecting 17 fuel stations in various parts of the country, three of which are in Addis Abeba, at an outlay of 20 million Br. This will raise the number of stations it owns in the country to 71. It now has seven station in Addis Abeba, mainly in suburban areas such as Akaki, Kaliti, Mekanisa, CMC, Burayu, and Gefersa.

Yetebaberut was established five years ago with a capital of 21 million Br by 21 shareholders who used to be in the fuel transport business. It supplies lubricants of only British Petroleum (BP), with whom it has a deal to be the sole distributor of in Ethiopia and Djibouti.