What has been the global experience with marketing deregulation?
The experience has been varied depending on the socio-economic climate. In Thailand and Philippines, for example, margins increased, but their geography is different from ours. In France, on the other hand margins turned negative as hyper-markets took away market share because of lower costs, till the oil majors fought back. So it is difficult to generalize. I am very confident that marketing margins in India would improve from the current levels as the current pricing mechanism is based on historic asset costs, which is low and will not sustain new investments. Are you not afraid of competition from multinationals? In BPC, we are certainly not afraid of competition. In fact we view it as an opportunity. We are fully aware of the impact of the competition and have taken adequate measures to prepare ourselves to face the competition. Two years ago, we began a major restructuring exercise, which is now being implemented. We have created five customer- based business units and one asset-b
