| I work for a major oil company, 1 of the top 4 in the world. And before you all start, I have nothing to do with fuel, I work sales and marketing for lubricants ... time for a pun or 2.
Joking aside, as in all sales and marketing organisations we gain and lose customers so it can be difficult to say if we are loosing customers due to a recession or not.
But, I work with distributors who buy our lubes and then sell on to all forms of users. Automotive, commercial (truck, bus, plant etc), manufacturing, agricultural etc
Those distributors that are selling the same volume of oil in 2005 as 2004 have kept the level of business but are making lower profits. Those distributors that are trying to maintain their previous year’s average pence per ltr profit margins are loosing business.
Based on the wide spread customer base these distributors deal with I would say that many markets are struggling and if we are not in recession we are very close to one and the slightest thing could trigger it. |