Background

BP’s downstream business, BP Oil, is one of the three core international businesses in the BP Group. Employing more than 35,000 people around the world it is the face BP presents to the general public. BP Oil operates in 70 countries and is a major brand in 50 of them. The other two main businesses are BP Exploration and BP Chemicals.

BP Oil is a highly developed decentralized organization: it needs to understand its local customers. It has five main regional headquarters. They are in Cleveland in the US, Brussels in Europe, Cape Town in Africa, Singapore in the Far East and Melbourne in Australia.

Each year BP Oil refines the equivalent of Kuwait’s entire crude oil output in its 13 refineries, then distributes and markets the resulting petroleum products to 3 billion customers around the world. Among them are the 5 million motorists who fill up at BP each day, and the world’s major airlines and shipping fleets.