Chapter 891 Crazy Gas Station

Seventh, Fan Xin inspected Zong's offshore drilling, Cheng. Taking the ship-based helicopter back to 6. Ganglan, he saw a large group of people making a fuss below. It seemed that there were police cars and police officers working on the scene, so he ordered the pilot to lower the helicopter to see what happened. .

Wu Fukuan, the governor of Donghai Province, said with some concern, "It's not safe to lower the flight altitude."

Fan Heng replied. "It doesn't matter. I often flew at low altitudes when I was in Panshi. The advantage of a helicopter is that it is convenient. You can check the situation on the ground at any time, but a private plane cannot."

The driver lowered the height in accordance with Fan Heng's request, and then he saw the situation clearly. It turned out that there were about two to three hundred people gathered near a private gas station, holding sticks and confronting each other, and about five More than a dozen police officers drove a dozen police cars and blocked the middle of the crowd to avoid violent conflicts between the two sides.

"Go and find out what's going on?" Wu Fukuan felt a little embarrassed about his face.

Fan Heng finally came to Donghai Province for an inspection, and when this happened, Wu Fukuan was naturally very uncomfortable, so he asked someone to contact the following to find out what happened.

Lei drove Li Xuan to contact his subordinates via radio and soon figured out the situation. It turned out that something was going on at a private gas station on the highway between Linzhou City and Haicheng City in Donghai Province. Two groups of people were involved in the incident. Just start moving down there.

"What is the reason?" Fan Xin asked.

"I heard it was because of the quality of the oil." the co-pilot replied.

Fan Heng nodded. I understand something in my heart. Take a look at the world situation. The collapse of Nasdaq had little actual impact on China's economy. Instead, it gave the country an opportunity to shine and shine.

This year is a good thing for China's economy. Driven by the good news of China's impending entry into China, the macroeconomic prosperity index has risen significantly since the beginning of the year, and the GDP will almost exceed 9 trillion yuan. An increase of eight percentage points over the previous year, and the economic benefits of enterprises have improved.

The most surprising and exciting sight is that state-owned enterprises, which have always been sluggish, actually performed the most eye-catchingly. Their number has been greatly reduced, but their efficiency has increased dramatically. A total of more than 200 billion yuan in profit was achieved throughout the year, a year-on-year increase of 140%, setting a record for the highest profit level since the 1990s.

All of this is of course brought about by the strategic adjustment of "retreating the country and advancing the people".

This reform, which began more than two years ago, has been proceeding steadfastly but without hesitation. Since the central government has not issued a specific plan to clarify property rights, privatization experiments in various places have shown their own unique abilities.

In those areas where state-owned assets are monopolized, changes are also underway, but the way they are manifested is different.

Generally speaking, there are roughly three changes. One is the large-scale overall listing of overseas items. China Telecom, China Unicom, China Petroleum, etc. have all decided to list in New York or Hong Kong. State-owned companies that have always been conservative have collectively gone overseas. It is by no means just one. Ordinary overseas financing issues involve great determination and painful choices for proactive change.

The second is a large-scale split and reorganization based on breaking monopoly and enhancing competition. Amid the world's criticism of telecommunications and other industries, the oligarchs calmly raised the scalpel against themselves. China Telecom will be split into five, China Petroleum and Petrochemical will be re-separated, China Civil Aviation is planning to reorganize, China Nonferrous Metals Group will be dissolved on the spot, China's five major military industrial groups will be split into ten, and almost all old state-owned companies are splitting up.

Third, the entrepreneurial groups of state-owned companies have emerged and are beginning to show their entrepreneurial qualities. As the direct operators of the two major changes of listing and restructuring, this group that has always been low-key and stable has been pushed to the forefront, and their entrepreneurial potential has been stimulated and demonstrated like never before.

International media have also observed this change, the "Asia Wall Street Journal" opined in a commentary. These new actions of blocking enterprises indicate that China's economic model is undergoing major changes.

Among these events, the changes in the petroleum and petrochemical industry are the best example of the above judgment.

The beginning of this year. The most in-demand commodity across the country is gas stations. In some places, their prices have soared three or four times. Gas stations are in demand, not because they are particularly profitable, but because there are people grabbing them.

The petroleum industry is a pillar industry of the national economy. According to the rules, once China joins the organization, it will reduce the import tariff of refined oil to 6% within one or two years and liberalize retail sales within three years. The batch will be released within five years.

In order to cope with this inevitable competitive situation, China's petroleum and petrochemical industry, which has been in a monopoly since the year before last, has undergone a major reorganization and established two major group companies, PetroChina and Sinopec.

According to the plan at that time. The two major companies have divided the oil field resources and refining company assets across the country, and their business is governed by the Yangtze River as the boundary.

This plan seems to form an enterprise structure that integrates upstream and downstream. This also avoids face-to-face business competition.

After the establishment of the two major oil groups, they immediately started competing for gas stations. In the view of their decision-makers, as long as they can capture all the gas stations before the multinational oil giants break into China, they will naturally form a Maginot Line of defense, at least having room to negotiate terms in the future.

At the beginning of this year, Sinopec took the lead in announcing that it would spend 25 billion yuan to acquire gas stations within five years. PetroChina then proposed a completely similar acquisition plan, but in actual operation, the actual investment greatly exceeded this budget.

According to the principle of dividing the river and governing it separately, the two companies should acquire on their own turf, but this agreement was soon broken, and gas stations across the country suddenly became the object of looting.

At present, the cost of building a gas station in an economically developed coastal city ranges from about 600,000 yuan to 1 million yuan. However, in the acquisition war, the selling price rose sharply due to the bidding of the two giants, and some popular stations rose three to four times within a year.

According to a report in Southern Weekend, the two companies' scramble at all costs raised the price cost. In Sichuan, the cost of acquiring a gas station ranges from about 2 million to 8 million yuan, while in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, it is generally around 10 million to 15 million yuan.

In Shishi City, Fujian Province, Sinopec and PetroChina fought for more than a dozen rounds for a medium-sized gas station with a superior geographical location.

According to the data recently announced by Sinopec, more than 9,000 new gas stations will be added nationwide this year, which means that nearly 30 gas stations will be acquired every day, bringing the total number of gas stations in the entire group to more than 25,000. PetroChina confidently stated that more than 1,500 new gas stations will be added this year. The total number of gas stations has reached more than 11,000

There are currently more than 80,000 gas stations in the country, including a large number of private gas stations. These private gas stations have become the targets of the two major companies. Under the guidance of various almost harsh industry policies, private gas stations are facing a survival crisis. Coupled with the existence of various uncertainties, this acquisition by the two major oil companies has actually become their most rare opportunity. Therefore, in a short period of time, almost all private capital in the gas station sector has withdrawn.

In addition to taking existing gas stations into their pockets, PetroChina and Sinopec have also implemented two major monopoly strategies in the name of national interests. One is to obtain the monopoly qualification for new stations. The State Economic and Trade Commission and other three ministries issued the "Notice on Strictly Controlling the Construction of New Gas Stations", which clearly stipulates that new gas stations in various places will be uniformly responsible for the two major groups of Sinopec and PetroChina in the future.

This strict control policy also caused dissatisfaction among local governments. Just 20 days after the notice was issued, Jiaxing City, Xijiang Province, issued a government approval document, approving the construction of 24 new gas stations in the local area, 18 of which were built by investors other than the two major groups.

This local approval document immediately caused a backlash from the oil regulatory authorities, leading to a small quarrel.

The media's analysis was sharp: before the notice of the Economic and Trade Commission, all localities had the authority to build gas stations, but after the "strict control", taxes mainly belonged to the central government, and local governments lost a source of revenue, so there would naturally be a backlash.

Second, large-scale, compulsory incorporation and exclusion of private oil fields.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, small private capital had penetrated into the field of oil extraction. In Shaanxi, Xinjiang and Jilin, private owners engaged in oil extraction through joint operations and contracting.

These oil fields are small oil wells with high extraction costs and small scale, and some are even abandoned oil wells that state-owned oil fields have abandoned. The existence of these oil wells has seriously threatened the profits of the two major oil companies. The existence of these private owners is considered to be the source of disrupting the order of the oil market and creating environmental pollution. Therefore, the collection and rectification of these private oil wells has become a strategic measure.

The media once disclosed an example that illustrates the actual situation.

The Yiqikelik Oilfield in Kuche County, Xinjiang is the largest abandoned oilfield in China. Since 1958, after nearly 30 years of exploitation, nearly 300 wells have been drilled, and more than 900,000 tons of crude oil have been produced. As the crude oil production of the oilfield has gradually decreased and is close to exhaustion, it has been determined by the PetroChina Tarim Oilfield Branch that it has no industrial exploitation value and is classified as an abandoned oil well. The year before last, PetroChina withdrew from the Yiqikelik Oilfield. Soon, a private enterprise called Jinhe entered the oilfield. It reached a cooperation intention with the local government and produced oil from nearly 300 abandoned oil wells, producing about 40,000 tons of oil per year.

Jinhe produced oil from the abandoned oil wells. This made CNPC quite unhappy. The Tarim Oilfield Branch reported to the autonomous region government many times, suing the Kuche County Government and Jinhe Company for exceeding its authority in the development of oil and gas resources, violating the Mineral Resources Law, and infringing on CNPC's prospecting rights.

Just like the approval of the construction of gas stations in Jiaxing, the oil company's monopoly on oil fields also caused a backlash from local interests.

CNPC also submitted a report to the State Economic and Trade Commission not long ago, opposing the plan proposed by the Lingxi Provincial Government to reorganize the private oil fields in Lingxi Province within the province. The report stated that private and county-level drilling and production companies in Lingxi area had been engaged in indiscriminate development and colluded with private oil bosses to seize the oil fields under CNPC with an area of ​​more than 10,000 square kilometers. The two sides had disputes many times over the years, leading to more than 150 group conflicts and causing many casualties.

The Lingxi Provincial Economic and Trade Commission also submitted a report to the State Economic and Trade Commission, arguing that local oil development has been on a scientific, standardized and orderly track, and local oil companies with local oil companies as the main body are capable of reasonably developing oil fields.

The report of Lingxi Province also stated that PetroChina used the national resource management mechanism and its own convenient conditions to register most of the oil resources in Lingxi area first, and even registered some plots of oil fields originally opened in the province under its own name, resulting in idle resources without substantial development.

The report also said that without oil, the local finances in the north of Lingxi would fall into trouble again and the people's hearts would be unstable.

It is precisely because PetroChina and Sinopec not only robbed resources from each other, but also robbed resources from private enterprises, and used their policy advantages to oppress private and local enterprises, which caused a lot of backlash in various places. The scene of competition that Fan Heng and Wu Fukuan saw on the helicopter today was actually a strategy to suppress the gas station under the pretext of oil quality.

Fan Heng observed the situation below on the plane. The geographical location of this gas station is indeed very good, and the scale is relatively large. In addition, with its private status, it would be strange if it was not regarded as a thorn in the eye by others!

It can be imagined that among the two conflicting parties below, there may not be people from the two major oil companies instigating behind the scenes.

"The two oil companies are so greedy!" Fan Heng said casually.

"The oil price has risen sharply recently. If the two oil companies completely block the market, I'm afraid we won't even be able to drive a car." Wu Fukuan also complained about the market encroachment of the two oil companies. He had to make a small report to express his dissatisfaction.

After all, the market expansion of the two oil companies has caused a large loss of local tax revenue in Donghai Province, which makes Wu Fukuan feel very distressed and it is impossible not to have any complaints.

Fan Heng nodded and said, "Dividing the river and governing separately is just a wishful thinking. In fact, in the market, everything is out of one's control. Even if they are as close as brothers, there are times when they look at each other's walls, not to mention that there are enemies with conflicts of interest? It's just that the market competition has reached a point of physical contact. I really don't know who is wrong and what is wrong?"

After seeing the situation here, Fan Heng has decided that he must cool down the leaders of the two oil companies after returning, at least let them know to restrain themselves. If things go on like this, even if they monopolize the market, they will be criticized by thousands of people.

Forced monopolies like PetroChina and Sinopec, which rely on administrative orders, are obviously more hated than natural monopolies like Microsoft, which rely on research and development capabilities and market share.

The acquisition of gas stations is a big fire. It really needs to be operated under control, and the fire must not burn itself.