Global Partners LP GLP

The business

Global Partners is a Waltham, Massachusetts MLP that buys, stores, blends, and distributes petroleum and renewable fuels across the Northeast through three segments: Wholesale (gasoline, distillates, residual oil, propane, plus crude-by-rail aggregation), Commercial (unbranded fuel, diesel, bunker fuel to public-sector and industrial accounts), and Gasoline Distribution and Station Operations (GDSO), which sells branded and unbranded gasoline to station operators and directly runs gasoline stations with attached convenience stores. By revenue Wholesale is the largest line at $12.66B of FY25 sales, with GDSO at $4.78B and Commercial at $1.12B. But the segment doing most of the profit work is GDSO: convenience-store fuel margins and inside-store gross profit are structurally fatter than refined-products wholesale, so GDSO converts a far larger share of operating profit than its roughly one-quarter slice of revenue implies. That is the engine of the equity story.

The qualitative fact the income statement understates is the retail re-rating gap. The market prices the whole entity on midstream-MLP multiples while the GDSO convenience-store assets, valued against c-store comparables, would imply a higher enterprise value than the equity carries. The Slifka family has built GDSO through steady bolt-on station acquisitions, and the magnitude of the Q1 2026 swing is the early signal: Q1 is seasonally GLP's weakest quarter because the Northeast heating-oil business is winding down, yet net income nearly quadrupled year over year to $70.1M, lifted in part by a $316.6M non-operating gain in the quarter. Strip the one-time gain and the underlying seasonal print is still positive, but the headline number should not be annualized.