Sunoco Acquires Coastal Mart Stores

Sunoco Inc. today reached an agreement with San Antonio-based Coastal Refining and Marketing Inc., a subsidiary of El Paso Corp. to purchase 65 of Coastal Mart's company-owned convenience stores and assume supply contracts with 24 Coastal distributors for 163 distributor additional units in the Southeast. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Of the 65 company-owned stores, 61 are located in Florida. Sunoco said it plans to rebrand all of these stores to its APlus convenience store brand. Of the 163 distributor sites, 109 are also in Florida with the remaining sites in Virginia and Tennessee.

"We are very excited about this opportunity to grow the company's retail site network by again returning the Sunoco logo to the U.S. Southeast through the acquisition of these high quality sites from Coastal Mart," said John Drosdick, Sunoco's chairman and CEO. "This purchase is a continuation of our strategy to pursue opportunities to grow the company's retail gasoline sales and non-gasoline income through the addition of new sites. We are confident that there is brand equity in the Sunoco name in this geographic area."

The deal increases Sunoco's company-owned store count to more than 650 and expands its distribution network to approximately 4,000 sites. Conversely, Coastal Mart, since being acquired by El Paso, has seen its store count drop from 580 in 2000 to less than 250.
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