The fastest growing energy company in Europe is Spanish, but it doesn’t install wind turbines or solar panels: it sells fuel cheaply. This is Petroprix, founded in Martos (Jaén) in 2013, and which has just been included by the Financial Times in the ranking of the 300 European companies with the strongest growth of the last decade (with data up to 2023).
In this list, prepared for the first time by the prestigious British newspaper Statista, Petroprix occupies seventh place, with an annual growth rate of 83.2%. The Spanish tourist site Traventia (eleventh) also stands out in the list and well-known companies such as Zalando or Spotify appear.
The Jaén company operates its network 100%, without resorting to the standard bearer or franchisee model. It is a national leader in the automatic (employee-free) gas station market. Its small gas stations, many of which are located in industrial areas, usually occupy the top positions in rankings for the cheapest fuels in many provinces.
With family capital, the company is controlled by the founder, Manuel Santiago, as well as his brothers and his ex-wife, María José Jiménez, also founder and very active lately in the world of venture capital.
Santiago, a telecommunications engineer, had spent half his life working for multinationals (Valeo, General Electric) until in 2005 he decided to focus on clean energy thanks to Avansolar engineering. But, he recalls on the phone, “they changed the laws and took our things.” After trying his luck in cogeneration and a new regulatory change in 2011, he had to rethink his course again.
At that time, in Barcelona, where he lived at the time, a gas station with unanswered calls caught his attention and it was clear to him: “We saw the market trend, we tried it and it turned out to be a business. with great interest in customers.
He himself probably didn’t foresee the sales growth the company would experience, especially in recent years. If at the beginning of 2020 the group set itself the objective of reaching 300 million turnover in two years, in 2021 the turnover would already reach 360 million. By 2022, the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this figure has doubled to 700 million. The inflationary crisis of recent years has “accelerated” the trend towards a citizen “who needs to save and travel to work; Ultimately, it’s a core product that we’ve made available to the public.
This year, Petroprix intends to close with a new turnover record of around 800 million, compared to 747 million in 2023. For 2025, everything will depend on the average final sales price, but its objective is to reach 1,000 million. Currently they have 160 gas stations open in Spain and hope to close the year with around 166.
By 2025 they want to open another 20 “organically”, but they are open to purchases to reach around 200. To put the figures in context, in Spain there are more than 12,000 gas stations. Its two main competitors in the “low cost” segment, Plenoil and Ballenoil, are around 270. Petroprix wants to see how to integrate “upwards, which no other “low cost” has, to obtain a little more margin”, with the acquisition of an operator on the wholesale market.
Santiago calls the 2024 financial year “atypical,” in which margins suffered from massive fraud in the hydrocarbon sector that “gave an advantage to some people who bought from fraudulent suppliers at low prices.” But next year, “they won’t have that advantage” and they will look at the opportunities that open up. The executive says fraud “is ending now”, after the Treasury intervened in many companies in the sector. And he hopes that the change which will come into force in the VAT law will eradicate a practice which “is still possible today”.
Plenoil was bought at the start of the year by the Portobello and Tensile funds, while Ballenoil passed into the hands of Moeve, the former Cepsa, but Petroprix is not considering an operation of this type or providing access to third party in its capital: “We are very focused on international growth” and “this is not the time to waste time on a corporate operation”, which “is very distracting”, according to its general manager.
In January they started their internationalization with the first gas station in Portugal. There, they hope to have 50 in operation by 2026. They are building gas stations in Panama and Chile and preparing to land in another European country. “Now is not the time to think about selling the business or bringing in partners, we are working very well from a profitability point of view,” he says.
No-cost electrostations
The company has signed agreements with Portuguese companies EdP and Emovili for the installation of fast charging stations for electric vehicles at their gas stations. The two companies currently have around 70 to 80 shippers. But “today, there is no big business behind it” and “it is more of a long-term positioning”, given that sales of electric vehicles are not taking off. “We are cautious and would like to have a little more money before making our own investments.” This is why they turn to partners.
Petroprix was founded at a time when competition was beginning to open up in a market that, according to its CEO, “tends to be monopolistic”. Santiago smiles on the other end of the phone when he remembers that, in those years, the warnings from traditional operators multiplied about the danger of so-called “unsupervised” service stations or about the destruction of jobs that they would cause.
While the CNMC demanded the activation of automatic gas stations, several autonomous communities tried to force them to have staff. “It was the European Commission that ruled that these regulations were contrary to European law.”
Another “myth” they debunked, fueled “by the big oil companies,” was that the fuel they sold was not of the same quality as that of traditional operators. “There were a lot of people who were reluctant”, but “this has been dismantled over the years”: European fuel regulations “are very strict” with regard to the characteristics that the product arriving at the pumps must have , which the vast majority buy. . to large oil companies with refining capacities in Spain.
Ten years later, “the model is fully consolidated, the public has accepted it and we are part of the Spanish fuel distribution ecosystem”. There have also been “no serious incidents” at these gas stations without employees. Administrative obstacles persist at local level, with some town halls “making your life impossible or imposing processing times of four years”.
The group has a total of around 370 employees. Around 300 correspond to Petroprix and the rest is divided between the automobile insurance subsidiary (Hello Auto), the payment solutions subsidiary (Wipay) and the structure which takes care of the different areas. Management is carried out from Madrid, but in Martos there are around 150 people.
“This is the fastest growing area in Jaén,” Santiago emphasizes. In fact, in August, the Cotec Foundation identified this city of almost 25,000 inhabitants, based on the analysis of data from Social Security affiliates, as the second small city in Spain (between 10,001 and 50 000 inhabitants) with the highest percentage of technological employment. 39.1%, just behind Beasáin (Guipúzcoa), headquarters of companies such as the railway manufacturer CAF.
In the case of Martos, the data is explained by a knock-on effect from the factory that the French multinational Valeo owns there and contrasts with the decline suffered by the nearby Linares, former headquarters of the defunct Santana Motor, in over the last decades. The city of Jaén can now boast of having a representative who occupies an important place in the pages of the world’s leading financial newspaper.
