While consumers brace for another big fuel-price hike tomorrow, this increase is likely to also hit fuel retailers hard.
The latest series of unprecedented fuel price hikes have overtaken outdated petrol pump technology, leaving retailers to work out the price of diesel themselves. The cost of updating this technology is not known at this stage.
The computer systems underpinning about 18 000 older-generation petrol pumps across the country cannot deal with more than three digits in the price of petrol - a maximum that is to be exceeded when diesel breaks the R10 per litre barrier at midnight, 6 May.
"The industry was caught a bit unaware by the huge price increases in the price of petrol we've seen in the last few months," says Peter Noke, national director of the SA Petrol Retailers Association (Sapra).
According to Noke, the Y2K-like switchover problem with the petrol pumps relates to the manufacturer-specific software as well as foreign chipsets that are used.
"We made the oil companies aware of the potential problem three to four months ago," says Noke, explaining that this gave companies enough time to address software glitches related to processing more than three digits at a time.
However, he says the problem-part of the affected petrol pumps, the "totaliser", uses software as well as a chipset to process data.
Cost question
According to him, older petrol pumps do not have up-to-date chipsets that can handle more than three digits, and this situation will take another two to three months to resolve.
Meanwhile, the Department of Mineral and Energy has agreed to implement a "divide by 10 and multiply by 10" principle, says Noke.
This means the price of diesel, set to change to between R10.67 and R11.72 a litre - depending on the sulphur content and the amount of the diesel price increase - will be displayed on pumps as R1.06 and R1.17. This amount is then to be multiplied by 10 by individual diesel retailers in order to reach a final price.
This adjustment is to be indicated on the relevant pumps with stickers.
This is going to be confusing in the beginning, not only for motorists, but also for petrol attendants, says Nokes.
However, industry and government are to meet on Thursday to thrash out a way forward and find ways for the situation to be resolved.
"There are not enough new pumps in stock," he adds, explaining that retailers will look to government for a way to mitigate the cost of updating their pumps.
Meanwhile, industry players either do not know how much it is going to cost to update outdated pumps, or are not telling.
Sapra referred questions about this to the SA Petroleum Industry Association (Sapia).
Sapia CEO Connel Ngcukana says he does not know how much it will cost to update outdated pumps.
Petrol giant Shell SA's communications manager, Dennis Matsane, did not want to comment on the cost issue. However, he said the delay in resolving the problem was "due to capacity problems and lead time in acquiring the necessary equipment".
He adds: "It will, however, take some time to effect the necessary changes to the pumps concerned."
Another major player in the domestic petrol arena, BP SA, did not respond to queries by the time of publication.
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