👉 Background: Viva Energy is one of the largest petrol station and convenience store owners in the nation with over 1,300 Shell and Liberty outlets. It's also in the process of acquiring the 700 Coles Express outlets. But it ain’t done with its lil spending spree of late...

👉 What happened: Viva has just acquired 170 On the Run petrol stations for $1.1 billion. OTR is a petrol station, but has been very successful integrating a range of other convenience store offers (Think: super sites with their petrol stations, car washes and restaurants such as Subway and Guzman y Gomez).

👉 What else: With the growth of electric vehicles likely to be a challenge for petrol stations, this makes sense for OTR owners to get out and Viva to broaden its offering.

What's the key learning?

💡With the growth of electric vehicles, petrol suppliers are facing existential questions on their future.

💡Get this: 6.8% of new cars in March were electric vehicles and 5.8% of new cars in March were hybrid. And while the growth isn’t rapid in Australia right now, these non-petrol-guzzling-cars means significantly less demand for petrol… over time.

💡So for Viva, they’re looking to reposition their brand to become a convenience retailer… that happens to sell petrol. And they’re hoping that this little shift will solve the potential existential problem that they face.

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