Hoyer UK MD says financial recovery in UK is "fragile"

The UK MD of Hoyer Petrolog, the German bulk transport giant, has said that Britain is “experiencing very mixed general economic conditions and fragile confidence” after the company saw turnover and profit dip.

Mark Binns, who also sits on the board at Hoyer GmbH as director of its Petrolog business, said: “In the UK, the fuels marketplace here continues to be a challenging and turbulent operating environment,” adding that there was stagnant customer demand.

His comments come as Hoyer Petrolog’s UK business said it had achieved a turnover of £94.4m for the year-ending 31 December 2014, a slight fall year-on-year from £96.1m in 2013 to, while pre-tax profit also fell to £2.9m from £3.6m.

“Overall sales revenues and volumes in the UK Petrolog business unit were similar to 2013, with reductions in some of our key contracts,” said Binns. He added that Petrolog shared-user fleet partly offset these reductions, alongside new fuels business in the south-east.

“Again, despite very challenging conditions underlying trading performance was reasonable, and an improvement on both expectations and on a disappointing 2013, and back to the levels of 2012,” Binns said. In financial year 2012 Hoyer Petrolog had a turnover of £85.5m with a pre-tax profit of £4.3m.

Binns said the results reflected Hoyer’s view of what it sees happening in the market where its long standing oil major customers were “losing fuels volume and market share whilst retail specialist network customers are being successful as they aggressively gain both additional volumes and market share”.

Internationally, Hoyer saw turnover rise to €1.1bn (£813.7m), from €1.08bn in 2013, with EBITDA also rising to €99.2m, from €90.9m in the previous financial year. In its annual report Hoyer said its Petrolog division, which moves fuels and bitumen in 11 European countries, had seen turnover only marginally higher year-on-year due to currency effects. With the pound strengthening against the Euro, turnover from logistics contrats in the UK increased accordingly.

Hoyer operates a further five divisions alongside Petrolog: Chemilog; Gaslog, Deep Sea; Foodlog and Techlog. Last week Hoyer acquired Norwegian bulk haulier Gran Taralrud, adding it to its Petrolog business - which accounted for 21% of total group turnover.