Tide Water Oil Co. (India) Ltd. of the Andrew Yule Group has announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation, Japan, to set up a 50:50 joint venture in India. The JV entity will be responsible for selling, marketing, distributing and manufacturing the “ENEOS” brand of lubricants in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan and catering to the factory and service fill requirements of mainly the Japanese original equipment manufacturers.
This JV is being set up with the intent that the two companies will collaborate further to develop and expand the market for lubricating oils utilizing the technology and know-how of JX Nippon Oil.
In 1993, Tide Water Oil had entered into a technical collaboration with Mitsubishi Oil Company to market its lubricants in India. This collaboration continued with Nippon Oil Corporation when the latter merged with and absorbed Mitsubishi Oil in 1999. In 2010, Nippon Oil Corporation was restructured and reorganized to become JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation, the largest petroleum conglomerate in Japan.
Tide Water Oil, having built a substantial lubricant business in India for its Veedol brand, continued to market the ENEOS brand in the country through a technical collaboration agreement with JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation. This also enabled it to gain a larger footprint in the OEM oil segment by virtue of becoming Genuine Oil suppliers to the leading two-wheeler companies in India like Hero MotoCorp, Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India and India Yamaha Motor, as well as other Japanese OEMs like Kobelco and Kubota.
JX Nippon is the largest oil company in Japan having interests in refining, manufacturing and selling petroleum products and in the energy sector. The company has footprints all over the world, including the US, Brazil, the UK, France, Russia, the UAE, India, China and other South-East Asian nations.