Indian Oil Brand Guidelines: A 1964 State Merger, Servo Lubricants & XP100 Petrol

A refiner and a marketer, merged in 1964.

Indian Oil grew out of India’s push to build its own oil industry after independence. The International Directory of Company Histories (2003) says the government’s 1948 Industrial Policy Resolution reserved new oil ventures for the state, and that through the 1950s the government clashed with the foreign companies then supplying the country, Burmah-Shell, Standard-Vacuum and Caltex, over refining, prices and imported crude.

Two state companies came first. Indian Refineries Ltd was formed in 1958 and, with Soviet and Romanian assistance, built refineries at Noonmati, Barauni and Koyali, the Directory says; the first, at Guwahati, started in 1962 with a capacity of 0.75 million tonnes a year, Autocar India reported. Indian Oil Company Ltd followed in 1959 to market petroleum products. At first it had no retail outlets and sold only to bulk customers; after a price war with the foreign companies in August 1961, government policy gave it the marketing share of the output of state refineries, according to the Directory.

On 1 September 1964 the two were merged to form Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. The company marks that date each year as its Foundation Day, PSU Connect reported. In the same year, according to a 2022 Autocar India feature, the new corporation began supplying fuel to the Indian Air Force and commissioned its first product pipeline, from Guwahati to Siliguri.

Nationalisation, research and Servo.

The corporation grew as the state took over the rest of the industry. In 1976 the government nationalised the Burmah-Shell refinery at Bombay, which became the main asset of Bharat Petroleum, and the Caltex refinery at Vizagapatnam, which was folded into Hindustan Petroleum in 1978, the Directory says. In 1981 Burmah Oil’s remaining interests in the Assam Oil Company were nationalised and Indian Oil took over their refining and marketing, including the Digboi refinery, which the Directory describes as India’s oldest.

Research and brands followed. The company set up its R&D Centre in 1972, Autocar India reported; the Directory places the research centre at Faridabad, near New Delhi, and says lubricants were developed there under the Servo and Servoprime names. Servo remains the company’s lubricant brand, English Wikipedia says. The Haldia refinery in West Bengal was commissioned in 1975, Autocar India reported, and Panipat, the company’s seventh refinery, in 1998, according to the Directory.

The 1990s and early 2000s brought reform. The Directory says the government sold nearly 10 per cent of the company to the public; that Indian Oil and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation took 10 per cent stakes in each other in 2000; that Indian Oil acquired the state fuel marketer IBP in early 2002; and that its monopoly on crude imports ended in April 2002 when the petroleum sector was deregulated. Its joint ventures in that period included Indo Mobil, a lubricants venture formed in 1994 and owned equally with ExxonMobil, and Avi-Oil India, formed in 1993 with Balmer Lawrie and the French company NYCO to make oils for defence and civil aviation. In 1999 The Hindu quoted the company’s aim “to become a diversified, integrated global energy corporation,” the Directory notes.

How refiners and fuel marketers present themselves.

Refiners and fuel marketers sit between the oil field and the driver, and their identities have to work at very different scales. The same name may appear on a refinery gate, the side of a tanker truck, a forecourt canopy, a pump display, a lubricant bottle and a page of an investor presentation, so marks tend to be simple shapes and short words that survive distance, weather and night lighting.

Much of the public image is still built on the forecourt. Station brands carry the colour and the logo, while the company behind them may run several names at once: Phillips 66, for example, says it sells fuel in the United States under the Phillips 66, Conoco and 76 brands and in Britain under JET. Payment cards, loyalty schemes and apps extend the forecourt to the phone; Phillips 66 promotes one app, Fuel Forward, across its three US brands.

Lubricants give refiners a second, shelf-sized identity. Bottles and drums are often sold under their own names rather than the corporate one, such as Indian Oil’s Servo or Phillips 66’s Kendall, and they sit beside competitors in shops and workshops, where a pack has to be recognised quickly.

The newest part of the story is told in announcements and reports. Companies present renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel and electric-vehicle charging through press releases, sustainability pages and investor material; Phillips 66 describes converting a California refinery to renewable fuels, and Indian Oil has added charging points at its fuel stations. Safety pages, refinery photographs lit at night and annual reports complete a register that is usually more technical than the forecourt. The guides in this group set out what can be checked about each company: its origins, owners, plants and brands.

A state refiner on tens of thousands of forecourts.

Today Indian Oil Corporation is a public sector undertaking under the administrative control of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, registered in Mumbai and headquartered in New Delhi, English Wikipedia says. Its shares trade on the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange of India, and as of September 2018 the Government of India held 51 per cent. Wikipedia says the group owns and operates 11 of India’s 23 refineries, counting those of its subsidiary Chennai Petroleum, with a cross-country pipeline network of more than 13,000 kilometres, and that its subsidiaries include Lanka IOC in Sri Lanka and IndianOil (Mauritius). Wikipedia also places it 94th on the Fortune Global 500 list as of 2022.

Indian press coverage such as Autocar India and PSU Connect writes the brand as one word, IndianOil. Autocar India reported in 2022 that the network reached its 10,000th fuel station in 2005 and passed 35,000 by 2022, and that in December 2020 the company launched XP100, a 100-octane premium petrol, alongside XP95. In November 2017 it opened an electric-vehicle charging point with Ola at one of its fuel stations in Nagpur, Wikipedia says, and by July 2022, Autocar India reported, charging or battery swapping was available at 2,368 of its stations. The same feature lists other products under the company’s name, including ClearBlue diesel exhaust fluid and composite LPG cylinders. Wikipedia describes seven business divisions, from refineries, pipelines and marketing to petrochemicals, exploration and production, and explosives and cryogenics, and an Indian venture with the Israeli company Phinergy to develop aluminium-air batteries for electric vehicles.

For a design guide, Indian Oil shows how a state company’s name can serve as its brand, carried from refineries and pipelines to tens of thousands of forecourts. Compare Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum, the two state-controlled companies Wikipedia names as its main domestic competitors. For this guide we use a saffron orange, a deep navy and a warm white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Indian Oil’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.