By AMADO P. MACASAET

San Miguel Corp., will have to shell out a premium for Ashmore Group to flip the sale of Petron.

Petron fits nicely with San Miguel’s plan to set up a logistics system that will include ports, grains terminals currently used by Asia’s largest food conglomerate.

On Friday, December 5, Ashmore is expected to give the downpayment for the remaining 40 percent government stake in Petron.

If San Miguel makes good its threat to buy Petron it will have to pay at least P6.55 per share Ashmore spent on Petron. Philippine National Oil Co., owner of the remaining 40 percent owned by the government valued the share at P6.55 each.

The PNOC valuation is higher than the P6.05 per share (peso equivalent per share for the $550 million purchase price) spent by Ashmore in buying Petron from Saudi Aramco.

It is estimated that Ashmore would have spent more than $1.1 billion to buy 90 percent of Petron. Ashmore paid P6.531 per share for the minority shareholders in a required tender offer.

San Miguel is known to have a war chest of over $2 billion. With its recent purchase of Meralco from the GSIS, it is presumably left with $1.5 billion.

San Miguel earlier announced it wants to buy more than 50 percent of Petron. San Miguel is known to be generous in pricing its bid. Now how much it is prepared to spend to get Petron will be known soon.

Petron is the only Filipino refinery acquired by the government of Ferdinand Marcos from Esso Standard, one of the so-called seven sisters, the giants in the refinery business in the United States.

Petron offered 20 per cent of its shares to the public about 15 years ago at P9 per share. The price represents a premium of P3 per share compared to the par value of P6. At one time, the price hit a high of P23 per share. But it has gone back to P4.37 on a thin volume of 161,000 shares by yesterday’s close at the Philippine Stock Exchange.

The premium has not been announced. It is known in business circles that SMC has a $2 billion war chest. It earlier acquired the 27 per cent of Meralco held by the GSIS for roughly P27 billion.

Petron accounts for almost 44.6 percent of total reseller demand for premium gasoline, regular, kerosene and diesel. It also sells the Petron gasul brand of liquefied petroleum gas used basically as cooking fuel.

Petron has 1,289 filling stations all over the country.

More than half of the stations are in Luzon which accounts for 60 per cent of demand for Petron products. The refinery, bought by the Marcos government from US-owned Esso, has 49 mini-stores owned by a subsidiary, Petron Marketing Corp.

Officials of the refinery said that on a per unit basis, the mini-stores called Treats, make more money than selling fuel from the pump.

They said that the 49 Treats outlets, all in Luzon, make a combined income of P15 million a month, or an average of more than P300,000 per store monthly.

Treats was set up to threaten Select of Shell but both of them are actually convenience facilities intended to attract motorists. Prices of consumer items in Treats and Select are markedly higher than in other similar stores selling similar products but are in more convenient locations.