Singapore — China's gasoline and gasoil exports soared to multi-month highs in January, mainly due to weak demand and high stocks in the domestic market.
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In January, gasoline exports rose 52.1% year on year to a 10-month high of 1.52 million mt, data released by the General Administration of Customs on Saturday showed. The last record high was registered at 1.698 million mt in March 2018.
Gasoline exports in January were also 19.1% higher from December, the second monthly consecutive increase since November, when domestic stocks started to build up.
"The leap in exports mainly comes from high stocks in the domestic market, amid relatively weak demand in the start of the year," said an analyst in Beijing.
China's social distributor gasoline stocks in end-January rose 11% from end-December to a five-month high of 268,920 mt, data from JLC, an energy information provider showed.
This could come from higher crude throughput in January, which lifted the availability of oil products in domestic market, and also prompted refineries to export more when domestic demand was weak, the analyst added.
The average run rate at China's state-owned refiners Sinopec, PetroChina, Sinochem and China National Offshore Oil Corp. rebounded to around 85% of nameplate capacity in January from 82% in December, a monthly survey by S&P Global Platts showed.
Also, the spur of using up oil product export quotas by the end of 2018 had pushed refineries to fix huge export volumes in December. Some of those might be postponed to load in January due to congestions in late December when many had suddenly increased exports, according to refinery sources.
Gasoil exports in January rose 43.1% year on year to an eight-month high of 1.84 million mt, also up 17.3% from December, GAC data showed.
Social distributor gasoil stocks in end-January also rose 4% from end-December to around 270,000 mt, JLC data showed.
Beijing has issued a total 14.15 million mt of export quotas for gasoline and gasoil so far this year, up 2.98% year on year, indicating sufficient quotas to support exports.
--Staff, newsdesk@spglobal.com
--Edited by Irene Tang, irene.tang@spglobal.com