Petrol dealers earn 12.19 sen per liter of petrol (RON95, RON97, RON100 etc) and 7 sen per liter of diesel (EURO2M, EURO5 etc). Last I read, small/medium petrol stations on average could sell around 500,000 liters per month - around RM60,950 of profit solely on petrol sales - excluding rental, staff cost, utilities etc. They earn more revenue from renting space for ATM, convenience store etc.

The petrol dealers would lose out if their customers use credit cards - 1% from the sale price, or 1.98 sen per liter for RON95 at the moment - so they would only earn 10.21 sen if customers are paying via credit card

Source: 500,000 liters a month

Yes, so you can see why they wanted to restrict the changes to only 5 sen per week. Anyway, I don't own a petrol station, I just study them I got a few friends who own petrol stations, but I never asked about how their profits etc.

One thing though, they all mentioned that they're all having headaches with the weekly price revisions as all their stocks are controlled by the petrol companies - sometimes, they just know when:

Fuel price will decrease when fuel tankers will line up to fill up their tanks at optimal / full levels on Tuesday and Wednesday
Fuel price will increase, when fuel tankers will generally not come on Tuesday and Wednesday, and their station tanks remain low - fuel tankers will come on Thursday

Yes, Petrol station dealers do not dictate the stock levels. It's done centrally by the petrol company - and all fuel sold by the petrol company to the dealers are done in cash/cheque immediately upon delivery. So for example a tanker comes with 20,000 liters of RON95 fuel, they need to immediately pay RM37,162 - Retail price is RM39,600, but it can be as low as RM39,204 if everyone is paying via credit card. Petrol dealers need rolling cash as well, because the credit card companies generally disburse the funds to them around 3 working days after the consumer swiped the card

Basically, the Petrol companies get their profit immediately upon selling the petrol to the dealers, but dealers will only get the profit once consumers buy the petrol from them So you can see the petrol companies have the upper hand when they themselves control the stock levels for all dealers, and the dealers are at the mercy of both the consumers and petrol companies.

Yeah, they get quite high profit from selling stuff from their own convenience store to supplement their profit/loss from selling fuel.

Yeah, so just an extreme example such as the above and the 7 sen loss as per this week's drop:

Refuel tanker comes at 3pm Wednesday to refuel 20,000L of RON95 - price drop is not in effect yet, and nothing is announced - petrol dealer needs to pay RM37,162.

Let's say the dealer only manages to sell 1,000L of that 20,000L on Wednesday, and people stop refueling coz price drop at 12:01am! Let's also assume that 100% are paying via credit card.

1,000L sold at RM1.98 - RM1,960.20 after credit card fees.
19,000L sold at RM1.91 - RM35,927.10 after credit card fees.

So they only earn RM36,887.30 - a profit of RM725.30 - it was supposed to be at least RM2,042 - a 65% drop in profits that's quite significant. Oh, and their tanks are significantly higher than 20,000L, so yeah, their profits can really take a hit.

Of course, the opposite is also true when fuel price goes up. They can get more profit from the lower price of fuel purchase. But you also need to remember that Malaysians would generally queue up to refill their petrol before the price increase takes effect - which reduces their chance to make profit from the price increase

Yeah, but the petrol dealer don't really get the benefits, the petrol company does