SHANGHAI (Interfax-China) -- China's crude oil imports surged 39% year-on-year in July despite record-level international crude prices, according to data released by China's General Administration of Customs today.
The country imported 96.37 million tonnes of crude oil in the first seven months of the year, up 14.8% year-on-year. Meanwhile, it exported 1.89 million tonnes of crude in the same period, down 44.7%. In July alone, China imported 14.83 million tonnes of crude.
"The growth in imports is slightly ahead of our expectations, despite some refinery shutdowns owing to losses from processing high-priced oil imports," Gordon Kwan, head of China Energy Research with the CLSA brokerage, said in a research note.
"We suspect that higher-than-expected imports are driven by faster-than-expected GDP growth and the continuation of strategic stockpiling to ensure adequate fuel supplies ahead of the Beijing Games, all of which suggest that next week's consumer price index could well be on the upside of 5%," Kwan said.
In response to a recent call by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country's economic planner, to increase supplies to the domestic market, Sinopec [NYSE:SHI], China's largest refiner, said it is now running almost at full refining capacity to ensure a supply shortfall will not occur in the market during the peak consumption season.
Despite lobbying from the country's major refineries to raise domestic retail fuel prices to be in line with international crude costs, the NDRC continues to keep fuel prices at the current low level due to already hot inflation figures.
The report also mentioned that imports of oil products fell 1% in the first seven months of the year. July imports of oil products stood at 3.7 million tonnes and exports were 1.07 million tonnes.
China's PPI up 2.4% in July
China's producer price index (PPI) grew 2.4% year-on-year in the July this year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced today.
Among the industrial commodities in the past month, prices of crude oil and gasoline softened from the same period a year ago but metals, both ferrous and nonferrous, broadly witnessed growth.
Below is a table specifying producer price changes for major industrial commodities in July 2007.
Producer price changes for major industrial commodities in July 2007
|
Sectors |
Producer price change year-on-year |
|
Crude oil |
-5.1% |
|
Gasoline |
-5.1% |
|
Kerosene |
0.2% |
|
Diesel |
0.5% |
|
Raw coal |
3.3% |
|
Large section steel products |
4.9% |
|
Medium section steel products |
6.3% |
|
Small section steel products |
10.6% |
|
Wire |
2.9% |
|
Medium plate |
5.8% |
|
Copper, aluminium, zinc, lead |
Between 3.3% to 54.9% |
Source: National Bureau of Statistics
(c) Interfax-China 2007. For more intelligence on Chinese metals and mining, click here or contact David Harman in Hong Kong at david.harman@interfax-news.com or (852) 2537-2262.
