GP Petroleums is best known for its brand, IPOL Lubricants, which has been in India for the last 40 years, and is well established in the industrial sector, whether it’s metal-cutting, machining or industrial lubricants, and so on. GP Petroleums, which was called Sah Petroleums until it was acquired by Gulf Petrochem a year and a half back, focuses on the lubricants business, specifically 90% on industrial lubricants and 10% on automotive lubricants by volume, and about 20% on automotive and 80% on industrial by revenue.
“Going forward, we want to capitalise on both these strengths, but we see that the contribution of automotive will increase over a period of time.
In the industrial space, we believe that we have close to about 5% of the market in India and are fairly established in most of the industries, from machining to general industrial lubricants,” said Hari Prakash.
The company is now looking to change gears by leveraging the strength of their global partner. “As a group, we are actually changing course by getting into value addition for customers. We want customers to go back from IMTEX thinking that, here is a brand that has a different flavour,” he added.
They are actively promoting products that result in operational efficiency. At IMTEX, they had a teaser which proclaimed that GP’s lubricants can save you cost. Hari Prakash believes that the customer will want to come up and enquire about what cost can be saved. GP has also developed a range of semi-synthetic coolants, which they believe will really take on in India and offer a good business opportunity for them.