Malaysian investor pulls out

A Malaysian investor in the LPG business has pulled out of Sri Lanka due to the uncertain economic climate, industry sources said.

E-Gas, the third player in the LPG business after Shell and Laugfs, has been low profile and done test marketing for the three years since it first arrived on the scene.

Malaysia is Sri Lanka’s biggest investor for two years running and a spokesperson at its High Commission in Colombo, said they had no information about the company. “They are not at the address anymore and we don’t know what happened,” he said. The embassy had earlier helped to promote this company. The Sunday Times FT also found the E-Gas office was not at its Longdon Place location. The phone lines were also dead.

In a November 2006 interview, E-Gas chief executive officer, Azlan Shah Mohamed Shah they were struggling with rising costs and a deteriorating security situation. "With the uncertainty in the country, we had to make some serious decisions on our future here. We were forced to rethink our strategy and decided to stay and adjust," he said. E-Gas initially had Expolanka as its local partner but then went its own way.

It had assumed a low profile unlike other bigger players and was servicing smaller areas through a combination of local marketing techniques and word-of-mouth sans mainstream advertising.