Thoughts on the Hungarian motor fuel market

Since the introduction of the price cap, most of the smaller companies have stopped importing motor fuel, so OMV has been doing the biggest part of this task in the past year – generating considerable loss for the company. On 3 June there was an accident at OMV’s refinery in Schwechat, after which production dropped to 20% of the origin capacity there. OMV had to find new sources if we wanted to supply our own filling stations with motor fuel. We had to buy at market prices and sell for less, due to the government-imposed cap.

Recently it has been a positive development in the operations of OMV that the Schwechat refinery is now working at full capacity, but the refilling of the tanks, in which the strategic reserves are stored in both Austria and Hungary, has tied up considerable capacity. In addition to the above, the production loss in the Danube refinery also contributed to the motor fuel shortage that occurred in December.

On 6 December the official government statement made it clear that the price cap had a serious impact on the working of the market. Scrapping the price cap will cause difficulties for lots of consumers, but we must agree with the fact that more expensive motor fuel is better than no fuel at all. We hope that other importers will now spring into action. OMV is going to complete the refilling of strategic reserve tanks – from which the motor fuel has been used up in the past few months – already in December. These things will surely increase the safety of supply in Hungary. As for the future, OMV plans to make serious investments, in order to switch to carbon neutral operation by 2050. //