The Untold Rise of Stabex: From One Fuel Station to an East African Empire (Part 1) #Stabex

Añadido: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]January 16th, 2019. That's the date that Stabex International Limited was officially registered at Kenya's Companies Registry under the Companies Act Cap 486. This was in Nairobi. It was incorporated in Kenya, yes, but it didn't open a single pump in Kenya, not even one. The very first thing this company did was to go to Uganda, specifically to a place called Nansana.

[00:00:22]That's on the Hoima Road out of Kampala.

[00:00:25]Now, why Nansana? Why Uganda at all? It actually makes a lot of strategic sense when you think about it properly. In 2009, Uganda's petroleum retail sector was dominated by two giants. Shell Uganda, it controlled roughly 34% of the market and it had about 120 stations across the country. Total Uganda was right behind them at about 24% with roughly 140 stations. Then you had smaller players, Gapco at 7%, Kobil at 5%, and Engen at 3%. Now, add those numbers up and you get about 69%. That means 31% of Uganda's fuel market, nearly a third of it, it was in the hands of what the industry called myriad small operators. People running one or two stations, selling fuel, and you know, not particularly organized. That 31% is a massive commercial opportunity just sitting right there waiting for someone ambitious enough to consolidate it. And Jackson Chebet saw it. But why specifically Nansana on the Hoima Road?

[00:01:23]Because Nansana sits on the arterial road that connects Kampala to Western Uganda, the direction of Hoima, which is also the direction of Uganda's oil fields in the Albertine Rift. There's high traffic, it's a commercial corridor. There are trucks, tankers, commuters, transporters, all of them moving through there every single day.

[00:01:42]So you see that one was not a random choice. Someone who picked that specific location was thinking like a serious businessman. Now, why incorporate in Kenya and then operate in Uganda? This is actually very common in East African business strategy. Kenya's Companies Act at the time, it offered a more robust legal framework than Uganda's for cross-border operations, banking relationships and credit facilities.

[00:02:03]They were more accessible from Nairobi.

[00:02:05]And crucially, Kenya's open tender system for petroleum imports, it was going to be essential later when the company wanted to grow. You need a Kenyan legal entity to fully participate in that system. So the structure was deliberate. Build in Uganda first, generate cash flows, establish supplier relationships, then use the Kenyan legal entity to access the bigger procurement systems when the time came. That's not the thinking of someone who has stumbled into business. That's a plan. Now, who is Jackson Kiplimo Chebet? This is the question I kept hitting against every single time I did this research. You know the honest answer? He doesn't want you to know. Those who cover Kenya's business community, they describe Chebet as one of the most influential entrepreneurs from the Kalenjin community. A community that includes, by the way, President William Ruto. That shared identity is going to become very important in this story much later on.

[00:02:55]What do we know about Chebet? Is essentially what he's done since 2009.

[00:02:58]What he was doing with his life between childhood and the moment he walked into a company registry in Nairobi with a plan to sell fuel in Uganda, all that information is simply not on public record. Is that unusual? Hmm. For private businessman, not necessarily.

[00:03:13]What we do know is that the oldest documented piece of his business history is a company called Ultra Eureka Farm Limited. That one was incorporated in 2002, 7 years before Starlinks. It produces fruit seedlings on farms in Chemurugui, along the Iten-Kabarnet Road, and in Chepkanga, both in Uasin Gishu County. And that farm holding company, Ultra Eureka Farm Limited, it will come back to this story in a way that you will not absolutely expect.

[00:03:38]Now, the original ownership of Starlinks International, it looked like this.

[00:03:42]Jackson Kiplimo Chebet, he had 925,000 shares out of 1 million shares. That's 92.5%.

[00:03:49]Abraham Kipkoech Korir, he had 50,000 shares. That's 5%. Then we have Daniel Kiprop Chege Rutich. He had 25,000 shares. That's 2.5%. Now, pause for a second. 92.5% to one man from day one in the East African oil marketing sector, this kind of concentration is unusual.

[00:04:08]Most mid-tier independent oil companies, the ones that grow beyond one or two stations, they eventually bring in institutional investors, strategic partners, a bank that takes a stake in exchange for credit facilities. You know something? Not Stabex. From the day it was registered to the present, Chebet has held overwhelming control. And by 2026, that control had actually increased. Daniel Cherutich transferred his 25,000 shares to Chebet, pushing his stake to 950,000 out of 1 million.

[00:04:37]That's 95%. There are only two ways to read that kind of structure. Either Chebet had significant personal wealth from the very start, you know, enough to capitalize a petroleum operation without needing external partners, or the formal ownership on paper doesn't tell you the complete story of who economically benefits from the company. Both of those interpretations, they're important and we'll come back to them. Now, I need to give you the commercial picture of what this company actually built, because without understanding the scale of the operation, you can't properly understand why people are fighting so hard over it.

[00:05:07]Stabex started with one station in 2009, a single pump at Nansana. By the end of 2019, 10 years later, the company had grown its annual fuel sales to over 300 million liters per year. By late 2025, the footprint of the company looks like this. Over 200 retail fuel stations, 14 bulk storage depots, operations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over 550 bulk resellers, you know, these are people who run their own fuel stations and they buy their supplies from Stabex. Then by late 2025, the company also had between 500 and 1,000 direct employees and they had 4.9% market share in Kenya, the fourth largest in the country. And this is not just fuel anymore. Stabex had expanded into cooking gas under the Stabex gas brand, lubricants under Stabex lubes, a coffee and convenience store brand called Star Cafe inside the stations, vehicle service bays, aviation fueling at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and a cashless payment card, the Stabex card. From one pump in Nansana to an integrated energy ecosystem in 15 years. That's impressive and also suspicious to some people. At some point around 2011, Stabex started operating in Kenya. And when it entered Kenya, it entered the big leagues.

[00:06:28]Kenya's petroleum retail sector, it works through a system called the open tender system. This is managed by the Ministry of Energy and the Kenya Pipeline Company. Essentially, it's the mechanism by which oil marketing companies import petroleum in bulk. You have to be registered, you have to qualify, and you get allocated a share of the import volumes. Stabex participates in the OTS. That means it's not just buying fuel locally, it's importing directly, which gives you access to much better pricing and much higher volumes. The specific OTS allocation that Stabex received year by year, that's not public information.

[00:07:02]EPRA doesn't publish those numbers broken down by company, but the output of those allocations is visible in the market share data. And the market share data, it tells a very interesting story.

[00:07:12]Here's the EPRA data for Stabex in Kenya. In the 2022-2023 financial year, Stabex held approximately 2.39% of the market. It was ranked around seventh. In the 2023-2024 annual data, Stabex was at 2.39% again. It was seventh place with sales of 130,792 cubic meters. In the 2024-2025 annual aggregate, Stabex was at 2.29%.

[00:07:38]Roughly eighth place. Now, watch what happens. By the third quarter of the 2025-2026 financial year, that is by September 2025, the quarterly data puts Stabex at 4.90% market share. In quarter one of 2026, the Petroleum Institute of East Africa, it puts Stabex at 5%. While everyone is watching in Kenya, Uganda has always been the primary territory of Stabex. By August 2023, when Chebet met President Museveni at State House Entebbe, he disclosed that Stabex had invested over 100 million US dollars in Uganda over the preceding decade. 100 million US dollars in Uganda alone. He also said that the company had more than 100 stations spread across all parts of Uganda and that they were planning another 40 million US dollars investment over the next 18 months. That's a serious commitment to Uganda. It's more serious than most people realize when they focus on the Kenya political story.

[00:08:31]The Uganda build, it followed a very clear pattern. Nansana was the seed.

[00:08:36]Then Stabex expanded outward from Kampala. You know, along major transport corridors into secondary cities along the routes that supply landlocked markets further west. By the time you get to 2023, Stabex is not just a Ugandan retailer. It's a regional distributor feeding the DRC, South Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi. The DRC piece, it's very important but also it's largely under reported. The Democratic Republic of Congo, it has no direct access to Mombasa port. Fuel that reaches Kinshasa or Bukavu or Goma from East Africa, it travels overland through Uganda or through Tanzania via Dar es Salaam. A company with over 100 Uganda stations and multiple depots along those corridors, it's perfectly positioned to dominate that DRC supply chain. In 2020, right in the middle of a global pandemic, Stabex entered the cooking gas market. They launched the Stabex gas brand both in Kenya and Uganda simultaneously. The numbers that justify this move were compelling. LPG penetration in Kenya at the time, it was approximately 17% meaning 83% of Kenyans were not using cooking gas. They were using firewood, charcoal, and paraffin.

[00:09:46]In Uganda, it was even more stark. 89% of households had no access to LPG. That is not even a gap, it's a whole ocean of opportunity. Starbec's strategy for the LPG play was simple. Use the existing petrol station network as distribution points, push similar affordable cylinder sizes into rural markets, and price aggressively to pull households away from traditional fuels. Did the timing of the COVID pandemic help? Almost certainly. When restaurants closed and people cooked at home, household cooking fuel demand spiked and Starbec's they launched into that surge. And then, by the way, here's a detail that deserves attention. By 2025, Starbec's had secured government LPG distribution contracts in Uganda. Facebook posts from the company, these posts show them distributing government of Uganda 13 kg LPG full kits to eligible beneficiaries in Bussembatia. That's a government program. Starbec's was trusted enough by the Museveni government to be the delivery vehicle for a state welfare initiative. Now, something that often gets ignored in business stories, when a company decides to get ISO certified, that decision tells you something about what they're trying to become. Starbec's has three certifications. ISO 9001:2015, that's for quality management system.

[00:11:00]ISO 14001:2015, that's for environmental management system. And ISO 45001:2018, that one was for occupational health and safety management system. ISO 45001 only replaced the old OHSAS 18001 standard in 2018. So, Starbec's got that certification within the first few years it was available. These certifications, they are not cheap and they also not quick. They require significant internal process restructuring, documentation, auditing, and ongoing compliance. Most small to medium East African oil companies, they don't bother. The reason you bother is because government tenders and large corporate contracts, they often require them. You go for ISO when you're actively chasing institutional business. Things like military supply contracts, government fuel programs, and large corporate accounts. You go for ISO when you want to play with the big boys.

[00:11:51]Starlinks started pursuing ISO certification in the 2018 to 2020 period. That timing is important because in 2022, that's when things got very interesting.

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