AVALON's global vision and strategy for growth at forecourttech 2024
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Mário Pereira, CCO of AVALON, discusses the company's plans for international expansion, key market trends, and the importance of such events in driving growth and innovation in the fuel retail sector.
What are the main objectives that AVALON aims to achieve by participating in forecourttech 2024?
forecourttech is a key event for AVALON. Our objective is to consolidate previous customer interactions from past events and whenever possible meet up with new customers. Also, to become aware of the latest market and technological trends.
How has your prior experience in the fuel retail sector influenced your approach to directing AVALON's commercial strategy?
AVALON has a very strong presence in Spanish speaking markets, namely Spain, Mexico and Central America, but the company is still making its first steps in the EMEA region. My objective is to bring all the knowledge and experience acquired over many years working in EMEA markets and try to help the company achieve their goals.
What is the company's plan to drive its international expansion in the technology market for service stations?
We have identified some key markets where we believe our solutions can contribute to improve the way fuel retailers manage their networks, namely North/West Africa, Eastern Europe & The Balkans and South America. The strategy is to build a sales team and partnerships in those regions to allow us to market our solutions.
What significant trends or innovations have you observed in the market that could impact the sector in the coming years?
Obviously not all the markets are in the same stage of evolution. When we look to North and Western Europe the trends are to consolidate and optimise as much as possible all the solutions deployed over the last 10 to 15 years, while in other developing markets we see very interesting opportunities for stations automation, payment and loyalty solutions, etc. The added value of AVALON solutions is that we have gathered inputs from the market during the last 40 years and our products incorporate years of best practices from key operators in Iberia & LATAM.
What role does collaboration and networking play in events like forecourttech for AVALON's growth and development?
These events are obviously crucial as they allow us to create a true network of high-level contacts while promoting the company’s brand and solutions to key market players. At the same time, these events allow us to be aware of the latest market trends that we can feed to our R&D teams and product managers.
While we recognize your extensive experience with international events, this year marks your first time leading AVALON's representation at trade shows such as UNITI expo in Germany and Stacja Paliw in Poland. How would you evaluate those experiences?
As I mentioned, these are crucial events if we want to be in the international arena. The feedback we got from the market was amazing but of course we need to convert all these good impressions from the visitors into actual business opportunities. We know that an international expansion is not something we can do in a matter of 1 or 2 years, it takes patience and resilience, but the vision of the company is that growth can only come from the international expansion and that is very much related to company exposure in international events.
What are AVALON's short and medium-term expectations, and how do these align with the opportunities presented at forecourttech 2024 in Alicante?
We have been in touch with most of the retailers attending forecourttech as the company attended this event already for the last 3 years and actually some of them are already our customers.
We are confident that we will be able to capture additional business opportunities and new customers due to the high quality of our solutions which is more and more recognised by our customers.
Although you haven't been with AVALON for long, how do you assess your time in the Spanish company so far?
I am about to accomplish the first 6 months in the company but to be honest it feels like a lot longer. We have been so busy trying to shift the company’s DNA from regional to global and it’s amazing to realize all the changes the company is going through at various levels. The motivation is high although we understand that there’s still a long road to walk. There's no doubts about that but the best is yet to come!
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