Belgium: A Breath of Pink Air

In the international oil world of giants, Belgium’s Petrofina is not notable for size; it ranks 18th among all oil companies. The remarkable fact about Petrofina is that it has become a strapping middleweight with hardly more than a skeleton to work with. After World War II, its lone refinery was in ruins, its fleet reduced to one 9,500-ton tanker and its only oilfields nationalized by Communist Rumania. Today it presides over 60 main subsidiaries in 18 countries, 10,000 service stations in Europe alone and a tanker fleet that totals 1,000,000 tons. Last year it raised sales 10% to $740 million, began refinery expansions that will almost triple output.

No U-Turn. Petrofina owes its recovery principally to astute Chairman-President Laurent Wolters, 61, a Russian-born Belgian who, in a long Petrofina tradition of clannishness, got his first job at Petrofina through a board member who happened to be his godfather. Wolters took over the wreckage at war’s end with a shrewd entrepreneur’s eye for opportunity instead of salvage. Since crude oil was cheap and abundant, he ordered Petrofina to forget production, buy its oil from other companies and concentrate on expanding its sales outlets. Petrofina expanded by buying up existing chains (such as British Cities Service), or by starting from scratch as in Canada, where 1,700 stations have been opened since 1953.

In the U.S., Petrofina’s expansion has been characteristically unconventional. Since 1956 it has planted 2,224 Fina service stations down the U.S. spine from Minnesota to Texas and is opening them at the rate of about 30 a year. Invading a hard-marketing industry in which gas prices are the same and Fina is no different from most other U.S. brands, the U.S. affiliate makes its soft sell way by disdaining wham and pow.

Its so-called “company slogan” is elaborately whimsical: “If you’re driving down the road, and you see a Fina station is on your side so you don’t have to make a U-turn through traffic and there aren’t six cars waiting and you need gas or something, please stop in.” With the help of California’s chirpy ad agency Weiner & Gossage, Petrofina spoofs competitors’ seemingly endless additives by transporting its gas in pink tank trucks and giving away “Pink Air—the additive of the future.” Petrofina reports a healthy rise in U.S. profits and sales (now $77 million).

No Instructions. With its outlets established, Petrofina has decided to broaden operations. It wants to gather at least some of its own crude oil, now owns fields in the U.S., Canada and Angola and is prospecting in six other nations, including its native Belgium (where it numbers among its 85% Belgian stockholders the ubiquitous Société Générale de Belgique, chief owner of the Congo’s Union Minière). It has also moved into petrochemicals, along with Union Carbide has opened a massive polyethylene plant at Antwerp to supply the Common Market.

Chairman Wolters, having never forgotten the lean years after World War II, insists on running a taut organization. Worldwide Petrofina headquarters on Brussels’ Rue de la Loi operates with 200 people, and its Manhattan executive offices have only nine. Wolters’ business credo is “Never long discussions—decisions.” He does not insist on making all of them himself, gives subordinates broad operating powers. Quick-stepping Harry A. Jackson, 62, American Petrofina president since the company was organized, considers this opportunity “a joy. Wolters is behind us rather than on top of us.” Adds a European Petrofina executive: “The word instruct is taboo at Petrofina. Even Mr. Wolters only gives advice.”