Sunoco oil company is getting out of the refining business in oreder to concentrate on the retail end of its business. Wasn't it just a couple of years ago that some other oil comapny sold all its retail stations to concentrate on its refining business?

You can't blame unions, the EPA, Bush, Obama, or anybody but Management here. When an established company decides to abandon a business that it has been in for years claming its "no longer profitable", it just means to current management team is too stupid to figure out how to make money at it. Which means to CEO and Board of Directors are too stupid, or too chicken, to find people who can figure it out.

Plainly, Sunoco should get out of the Management business!

http://finance.yahoo.com/ne...&pos=8&asset=&ccode=

Yeah, my brother works at the refinery in Tulsa, and a year or two ago Sunoco was either going to sell it or close it. And he had just bought a house days before he heard the news. Thankfully it was bought by someone called Holly Corp. His email address changed, but everything else has been the same.

Good for your brother. I know it's possible to make money refining oil. How come these idiots can't figure that out?

quote Originally posted by Zeb: When an established company decides to abandon a business that it has been in for years claming its "no longer profitable", it just means to current management team is too stupid to figure out how to make money at it.

Or it means that times are changing and they want to get out before the bottom drops out. Getting out early so you don't lose your shirt in the long run isn't stupidity. They also have 'insider' knowledge we don't.

quote Originally posted by User00013170: Or it means that times are changing and they want to get out before the bottom drops out. Getting out early so you don't lose your shirt in the long run isn't stupidity. They also have 'insider' knowledge we don't.

This.

Brad

Hmmm. The line I've always heard is that the US is maxed out on refinery capacity and that we need to build more refineries. What happened to supply and demand?

They operate one of the refineries in Toledo about 5 minutes from my house and it always reeks and they can't seem to control their flare towers. The BP one that my dad used to work at which is also about 5 minutes from my house has none of these problems.

It was Exxon that sold most of it's company owned stations but there's a big difference in getting out of the retail business and getting out of the refining business.

Nowadays, "retail" business also means being in the convenient store business when it comes to "service stations" and Exxon had no desire to continue in that convenient store parade, plus they were required to divest themselves of XXXX number of stations when the Exxon/Mobil merger came about, so they simply chose to get out of the company owned station business altogether.

Unless you are a big player in oil and have lots of proven reserves of your own, it is difficult to make a go of it in today's refining world if you don't have an efficient refinery and a set of processes in place to make marketable products from the heavier feedstcok left after the lighter distillates come off the cracking operations.

I don't really know anything about Sunoco or their refinerys so I'll not haxard a guess as to why they have lost money 8 of the last 10 quarters on the refining end.

Maybe they have to sell the refineries to pay for the NASCAR deal.

You can't be all things to all people.