Galp and Moeve End Talks on Combining Their Businesses in a Plan Targeting 3,500 Stations
Key Facts
Portugal’s Galp and Moeve have ended talks on a potential combination of their downstream businesses without reaching an agreement, the companies said on October 26, 2026. The parties said they had not reached final terms that met their strategic and financial criteria for a long-term, value-generating partnership. Galp’s chairwoman said the strategic rationale for the proposed transaction remained compelling in her view, but the parties had not achieved the necessary commercial alignment. She added that a sustainable, value-generating partnership required commercial alignment that could not be reached. The companies did not detail which criteria prevented an agreement, while Galp said the end of the talks would not change its current operations or its confidence in the potential to create value from its downstream portfolio independently.
Negotiations began with an announcement on January 8, 2026, when Galp and Moeve shareholders Mubadala and Carlyle reached a non-binding agreement to explore combining their downstream businesses. The plan proposed creating two companies in the Iberian Peninsula, one for retail and the other for industrial activities, bringing parts of the parties’ businesses together in two platforms. Galp described the agreement at the time as a proposal for negotiation, not a final deal or a commitment to complete the combination. In its second-quarter trading update, Galp said talks with Moeve’s shareholders were progressing constructively. The parties were then targeting the signing of a potential agreement during the second half of 2026, before negotiations ended without a deal.
The retail business was to target a network of about 3,500 service stations, most of them in the Iberian Peninsula. Galp estimated that combined sales of oil products to direct customers would exceed 6.5 million tons in 2025. The arrangement would have brought the two companies’ presence in fuel retail and station-related services together in a single proposed business. The industrial business, meanwhile, would have included three facilities with combined crude-oil processing capacity of about 700 thousand barrels per day. The proposal envisaged Galp retaining a minority stake of more than 20% in the industrial business.
Galp said in a July update that any deal should deliver long-term value for all stakeholders and provide an appropriate financial, governance and operating framework for the combined businesses. Those conditions provide context for the criteria the companies later said they could not meet, without identifying any specific term as the reason the talks failed. Galp’s chairwoman said the strategic rationale for the proposed transaction remained compelling, but acknowledged that the necessary commercial alignment had not been achieved. The company, meanwhile, stressed that its downstream portfolio remained capable of creating value on its own. It also said the end of negotiations would not affect its existing operations.
Moeve’s chief executive said its “Positive Motion” strategy had always been independent of the proposed deal. He described a potential combination with Galp as an opportunity to accelerate value creation, but said it was not a condition for executing the strategy. The comments frame the end of the talks within a plan that, according to Moeve, was not the basis of its strategic programme. For Galp, the announcement that negotiations had ended came on the same day it published its third-quarter 2026 results, before the Euronext Lisbon market opened. The company had set October 26 as the date for publishing those results, but the available evidence does not include a market reaction to the end of the talks.