Growth Potential That Extends Beyond the Bottom Line

When I joined Shell more than 23 years ago, I never imagined that I’d one day become Executive Vice President of the Global Commercial business, supporting a team that serves more than one million customers worldwide.

It’s been a long journey to get here and there’s certainly been some mistakes along the way. Throughout the ups and downs however, I like to think that what Shell saw in me from my very first day, was my potential.

Potential is such an important thing and something which Shell values greatly. No person, project, or company is perfect from the beginning. But with a little potential – and a lot of hard work – there is always cause for optimism.

Take the Shell Eco-Marathon, for instance. Now one of the world’s leading student engineering competitions, it all started when a Shell Research Director, Bob Greenshields, made a friendly wager with his colleagues to see who could get the best fuel economy from road cars adapted to maximise energy efficiency.

Bob’s initial record of 49 MPG certainly didn’t last too long, but the legacy of the idea did. The team saw the potential in combining the brightest student minds with the puzzle of road transport energy efficiency. And they haven’t looked back since.

And just as Bob saw potential in that idea, we continue to see our own potential for changing the course of global issues, such as sustainability. Our Global Commercial business helps drive projects across the world through close collaboration with industry leaders such as Neste and Deloitte, all with the aim of providing more and cleaner energy solutions that will bring us closer to our goal of becoming a net-zero carbon business by 2050.

And now, as a next step on our journey, we are proud to announce the transition of our lubricants business to Shell Lubricant Solutions. Driven by a desire to help our customers realise their full potential, this change will see us adapt from a lubricants supplier to an end-to-end solutions provider. Solutions that tie together two of today’s key business drivers: sustainability and profitability. To show what this means in practice, I’d like to share three examples with you:

Dilip Buildcon

Having grown from five employees in a small garage in India to the largest engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company in the country, Dilip Buildcon knows a thing or two about potential. As a partner, we’ve helped the EPC leader maintain their now 11-000-strong equipment fleet with maintenance solutions, such as our premium Shell Gadus greases.

But unlocking potential isn’t restricted to equipment. It’s equally as, if not more, important when it comes to the potential of your people. Having always held workforce safety in high regard, Dilip Buildcon engaged us to support on employee safety training and wellness drives, including on-site eye-check-up camps. Together, we’re helping to power progress through solutions that have people at their core.

Fuels and Lubricants Joint Testing

Sometimes, the best solutions are a product of thinking outside the box. While consumables are traditionally tested in silo, we recently brought together the best of Shell Global Commercial by combining our fuels and lubricants in extensive field trials, to investigate whether a combined efficiency package could help our customers meet their performance and sustainability targets.

Across two independently administered tests, the combination of our Shell premium fuels and lubricants resulted in some astonishing performance benefits. For on-highway vehicles, an 8.9 per cent combined fuel economy was achieved, while off-highway equipment benefitted from an additional 2.83 hectares (agriculture), 236 (construction) or 472 operating hours (mining) as a result of the efficiency package. While 100 per cent injector deposit clean-up proves that environmental goals don’t have to be sacrificed.