Pro Gas cooking gas

Is anyone else impressed with the ‘Pro gas’ company’s strategy as I am, with barely 3 years in the Kenyan market the company seems to be controlling a significant market share. The company undertook a proper market audit to identify gaps in the Kenyan cooking gas market, identified a high potential segment and pounced.

In a country with slightly over 4.6 million urban conventional households; 53% of the population use LPG gas for cooking, 18% use charcoal, 18% paraffin, 9% firewood, 2% electricity and close to 1% use bio gas this is according to the 2019 census report by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. Pro Gas had its work cut out.

The strong existing cooking gas brands such as Total 19% market share Kenol Kobil 16%, Libya 15%, Vivo 14%, and Hashi gas 11% share according to the Q1 Industry report by the Petroleum Institute of East Africa operate from physical stations on major roads around the country but this is not where most customers live. Customers are clustered in neighbourhoods away from the roads and prefer convenience, the nearest suppliers: independent distributors realized this when they built their business model around supplying gas from petrol stations and pivoted to the whole refilling and distribution business by themselves. These were the identified competitors of pro gas.

What market entry strategy did they decide? - Compliance with regulations. What action did they take? - Lobby for enforcement of the rules. What did they achieve? - Through systematic enforcement of the rules by government agencies; supply to independent distributors is continually being stifled leading to under supply, increased prices and customer frustration. What will they do?- come in with a branding strategy to occupy the vacuum being left behind converting the ‘independent distributors’ to its dealers offering better prices,

promotion, visibility and support which was missing initially. What will be the outcome? - Customers loyalty will continually shift in their favour

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What is the biggest threat? – ‘Mainstream stations’ cooking gas suppliers will also revise their strategy and dedicate focus on distribution and penetration into this fertile market messing the projected productivity of the ‘Pro Gas’ targeted customers, they will ride on the inherent advantage of bigger brand equity.

With all this going on let’s not be blind eye to the start-up innovations eyeing this market with bio fuels Koko networks, Sistema.bio, efficient ‘Jikokoa’ by Burn Manufacturing and briquette suppliers such as Adarsh Polymers who are chipping away the at the market. We are all anxious to see how this plays out