After a careful situation analysis
and good environmental scanning, Chevron has steadily focused on its marketing
efforts on areas where it has a strong competitive position. Significantly, Chevron's areas for refining and marketing operations are
the west coast of North America, the U.S. Gulf Coast extending into Latin
America, Southeast Asia, South Korea, southern Africa and the United Kingdom.
To enhance a competitive position and maintain market dominance, Chevron
embarked on upgrading its refineries, so as to "manufacture transportation
fuels from a wide variety of crude oils, improve reliability and create more
high-value products from cheaper feedstock; it has also made investments to
improve "product yields, reliability, efficiency and environmental
performance".
Since 2009, it has performed
several upgrades on its refineries, in which they are expected to be completed
by this year. However, there are several areas in its operations that are
"costly to supply, where "its brands have a relatively small
presence"; as a result of this, already in 2009 Chevron made 14 market
exits, selling its assets primarily in Africa and Latin America. it also
"announced plans to withdraw the Chevron and Texaco motor fuel brands in
the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and other Eastern states".
According to a statement made on its website, "We plan to continue our
portfolio optimization efforts, which are expected to result in a market
presence in fewer than 40 countries over the next few years while retaining
scale and materiality".
Chevron as it is today still maintaining a strong
market position with good competitive advantage in the industry, and this has
actually reduced its business risk.