Recent Danish Independents

DK

Brief History

DK is an independent Danish petrol distributor that grew from nothing in 1982 to around 250 filling stations by 2005, representing over 5% of the market. Its most rapid growth was after 1991 when Norsk Hydro acquired Uno-X, allowing DK to take over Uno-X's former marketing position of being the premier all-Danish petrol company. Even the pole signs outside station carried the phrase "Kør Dansk" to reinforce this message. However in the late 2000s it was taken over by OK, consolidating the latter's position as the largest petrol company by number of retail outlets.

Maps

	All the maps shown are produced for DK by FOLIA/LegindKort and come from the mid-late 1990s. The one on the left is slightly older (1997?) and is at the smaller scale of 1:640,000. Sjælland (Zealand) is on the reverse side of the map. The more recent example (right) keeps the whole of Denmark on a single side at the more common scale of 1:500,000 and has been used from ca1999-2001.
	In common with most other Danish petrol companies, DK also issues a booklet listing the addresses of all its Service Stations, and including a small scale (ca 1:1,000,000) map of Denmark showing their locations. The example (lower left) is dated 1998 and as can be seen from Fyn (Funen) on the right, the map is of reasonable quality if a little congested by DK logos.

Metax

Brief History

Metax was established in 1971 (although its origins were a coal importer established in 1892) and became a specialist supplier to unmanned discount outlets, known as automats in Scandinavia, although a small proportion of its chain had an attached shop or kiosk. It was acquired by Shell in 1979. In the 1990s Shell sold Metax to independent owners, although operationally they still work quite closely together, accepting each other's payment cards and in 2007 the 70 stations were folded back into the Shell chain as unmanned Shell Express outlets.

Maps Historically Metax has mainly distributed a leaflet marking its locations on an outline map of Denmark with no roads, and giving the address for each site. However the company is known to have produced a sheet map in the 1990s produced by Folia Legindkort, and in April 2003 Folia prepared the map booklet shown here. Although primarily billed as a station locator, it included 9 double pages of good quality maps at the useful scale of 1:500,000 preceded by 24 pages of town plans; both marked all Metax locations. As Metax is based at Aalborg on Jutland, more towns are shown for Jutland than the islands.

No maps are known from any of the smaller independents, such as Haahr (which was sold to Statoil in 2004).