X Convenience service stations, started by Kosmidis brothers in Adelaide, sold to BP in 2024: OTR deal response

X Convenience service stations built into a network of more than 50 in South Australia, and expending into Western Australia, from a single outlet started in Adelaide by Tom and Steve Kosmidis in 2006. Inset: Steve Kosmidis giving driveway service at one of the service stations in 2013.
Images courtesy The Greek Herald

BP oil and gas global superpower struck a deal in 2024 to buy South Australian family-owned fuel and convenience retailer X Convenience and its network of more than 50 petrol stations across South Australia and Western Australia.

The deal was seen as BP's response to losing the OTR service station network, bought by Viva Energy that sold Shell-brand fuels in 2023. OTR, also South Australian family-owned by the Shahins, was the biggest rival to X Convenience.

X Convenience adopted a model similar to OTR, based on a higher-end convenience to lure consumers to spend more time and money in-store with brands like Coffee Station, Smokes Express, Burger X, and Down Dog N Shakes. X Convenience was started in 2006 with a single service station in 2006 by the Adelaide-based Kosmidis brothers Steve and Tom. By 2013, they had had six sites across Adelaide.

Younger brother Steve adopted a more aggressive strategy – opening multiple new sites each year, including expanding into Perth in 2021, and growing the network to more than 50 sites. Tom Kosmidis stepped down as a director of several of the Andrash group of companies that operated the X Convenience business in 2017, leaving Steve as the sole director and driver of the company’s expansion, including into Western Australia in 2021.

BP’s takeover of X Convenience meant it would replace Mobil as its fuel supplier. BP also saw an opportunity to use the X Convenience sites to accelerate the rollout of its electric vehicle chargers. It had already installed more than 120 BP pulse charge points across its network of 1200 sites across the Australia.

BP vice president of business development and low carbon solutions Lisa Archbold said the deal  wasn’t just about the sites: “It’s certainly an enormous local success story, and it’s grown really rapidly. The offers that they’ve got in market are really first rate – a very high quality offer, a high quality network.”