What has Austin Avuru become?

Sopuruchi Onwuka

It is almost a bizarre struggle to attempt describing a phenomenon that is continuously amorphous because constant changes in such circumstances introduce new features that compel relentless modifications in interpretation, depiction and appellation. Such phenomenal dynamism, normally associated with constant growth, portends a misnomer when linked to a process that extends beyond a notional peak.

The Executive Chairman of AA Holdings Limited, Mr Austin Avuru, is growing increasingly amorphous: morphing through several business models in the petroleum industry as he proves to players that every niche of the sector hosts potentials for convenient flow of income. And his many parts have become difficult to be totally captured in a simple definition. This is mainly because Mr Avuru keeps exuding new forms of energy, creating new ideas and pumping out new forms of products outside his conventional terrains. Now Mr Avuru has become a prolific author of not just technical papers and instructional textbooks. He is an expository writer who relates first person point of view in laying pathways for both upstarts and experienced entrepreneurs seeking success in the field of play.  

At the just concluded 41^st International Conference and Exhibition hosted at Eko Hotels, Lagos, by the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE), people clustered around to hear Mr Avuru’s views on raging debates. Many followed him around for business referrals; and many others milled around him for business for advice.

The conference featured numerous side attractions that include full composite onsite clinic by Shell; eye clinic by Seplat (initiated during Mr Avuru’s time as the Managing Director); seminars by TotalEnergies, Seplat, Chevron and other companies.

Service companies displayed several innovative exploration and oilfield operating tools; and their exhibitors fielded questions and sundry enquiries from large population of hungry conference delegates most of whom queued endlessly and without success for food at lunch times.

From the beginning of the conference, staff at the A A Holdings’ stand were active with numerous transactions with variegated visitors seeking to buy unusual products: the several books written by Mr Austin Avuru himself, or written on Austin Avuru by other authors. In all, people were actively staking real money to catch up with Mr Avuru’s perspectives on how to run upstream petroleum business. No book fair could record equivalent level of success.

Relating his experience across years of playing senior management roles and building successful indigenous exploration and production companies in books is now a new business that justified buying an exhibition space at an international conference. And the massive response from crowds of visitors that thronged the pavilion did not just put the exhibition staff to task. It called for more engagement!

On the second day of the event, it was announced that Mr Avuru himself would be available for direct interface with his audiences: students, professional geologists, peer executives, industry leaders and policy makers, and of course, beneficiaries of his several intervention programmes.

Outside the pavilion, bewildered industry journalists argued how best to describe Mr Avuru as he signed away at books from a long list of readers seeking his autograph. In other couches around the stand, several industry executives patiently waited to hold their own rounds of discussion.

“From professional leader to industry analyst, investor, administrator, business incubator, author, philanthropist and mentor, what is your best appellation now?”  Mr Avuru was asked.

“I wonder if I have any best appellation now because everything you see me do now I have been doing many years before now. Yes, including writing!” he responded while starring into a book.

“So you don’t know what you have become?” he was asked.

“I am also trying to figure out what I am becoming,” he said quietly, lifting his head slowly this time.

Mr Avuru has received several industry accomplishment awards. He has also received lifetime achievement awards. These awards poured in from industry investment groups, professional groups, leadership groups and even media groups. And they continue to come as Mr Avuru continues to stamp his footprints from one company to another; and from one industry group to another. It has become increasingly difficult for him to peak!

He is a Fellow of NAPE, patron of the Nigerian Council of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) International, and Association of Energy Correspondents of Nigeria (NAEC).

An alumnus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Mr Avuru has built a Geology Centre of Excellence for the department from where he emerged with flying colours. He is also working with the Catholic Church on one of the best secondary schools that will soon flourish in Delta State.

Mr Avuru recently retired into A A Holdings from Seplat Energy Plc where he was the pioneer and founding Managing Director. Aside from founding the company in collaboration with a funding partner, he ran a management system that led to rapid growth of the company to a point Seplat could now be listed simultaneously at the London and Lagos bourses. Oversubscription of Seplat’s shares at the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) simultaneously confers credibility on Mr Avuru’s management principles.

Today, Seplat remains one of the best managed and most successful indigenous exploration and production companies. With three brownfield assets acquired from divesting Shell in 2010, the company has since pursued accretive growth initiatives that entail organic and inorganic reserves building. Additional assets acquired from Chevron and Eland Oil expanded its reserves base and underpinned one of the most ambitious natural gas monetization projects in the industry.

The company’s ANOH field gas development and processing project will soon position Seplat in the first row of natural gas suppliers to the domestic market, and make it the leader in government’s natural gas monetization programme.

Seplat is not the only positive appraisal on Austin Avuru’s innovative business models. The company is indeed an offshoot from Platform petroleum, a marginal field producer where Mr Avuru was also the Managing Director before the birth of Seplat.

Business templates laid by Mr Avuru has ensured that Platform Petroleum remains ahead of its peers in reserves replacement and full asset commercialization. The company, though a marginal field operator, is also one of the biggest indigenous gas players currently on course to displace significant volumes of imported cooking gas with domestic production.

Austin took over management of Platform Petroleum after stints with Allied Energy, a company which appears to have remained at the point Mr Avuru left it. He had joined the company after leaving the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) in a move that announced him as an innovative thinker.

He remains among the very few that volunteered out of the highly coveted positions at the defunct Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), a move many of his contemporaries had considered a rash misstep into an uncertain and unsecure future in the private sector.

A brief interaction with Mr Avuru shatters the stereotype of low expertise slammed on locally groomed petroleum industry professionals. He remains one of the very rare locally schooled Nigerian professionals whose pulse has sustained the longest activity plateau in the petroleum industry. His industry vibrancy has also covered some of the widest experience ranges in the operating environment; upsetting templates, challenging stereotypes and pushing frontiers.

From the days he left the national oil company till today, Austin has remained a model for enterprise building and innovative business strategies; optimising values from bypassed opportunities and introducing new ways of gleaning wealth from lean petroleum assets.

At A A Holdings, Austin makes it clear that he is yet to be what he could possibly become. He now explores new business prospects and offers partnerships that enable industry upstarts work efficiently on lean assets to optimize every commercial opportunity that hold potential for scaling the business.

It was rumoured that President’s men were courting him into an economic team that would help the Tinubu government steer the economy from the precipice. Austin said he has not had such discussions. In the meantime, he authors books that unlock potentials.