Oil prices eased on world markets on Friday as traders locked in profits after a rally earlier in the week sparked by a surprise production cut by the OPEC cartel.
New York's benchmark light sweet crude November contract slipped US$0.13 to US$28.16 in late trading.
The price of reference Brent North Sea crude oil for November delivery dipped US$0.31 per barrel to US$26.50 in London trading.
PHOTO: AP
"After the news from OPEC this week, there is a bit of profit-taking into the weekend," said GNI trader Kevin Blemkin.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries surprised oil markets on Wednesday by agreeing to trim its overall production ceiling by 900,000 barrels per day to 24.5 million barrels, sending prices soaring.
The decision followed a sharp fall in world oil prices in the month ahead of the meeting at its Vienna headquarters.
But with supplies rising from post-war Iraq -- a member of OPEC but not part of its quota system -- and rivals such as Russia, many analysts think prices could start to weaken again.
"I think prices will keep deteriorating next week," said Kevin Blemkin, a trader at GNI.
"If there was no follow-through in the rally [this week], I'm not sure we're going get one."
Meanwhile, traders paid close attention to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to the US.
Putin ate a ceremonial glazed doughnut to open a service station in New York on Friday, and a US senator used the occasion to bash OPEC.
The moment was a small but sweet victory for the Russian oil baron Vagit Alekperov: The Getty gas station he bought in Manhattan three years ago was renamed on Friday after his own huge oil company, Lukoil.
Alekperov wanted US consumers at the pump to understand that they need Russian oil and that companies like his are ready to provide it. For the last two years, oil has become an increasingly powerful bond between the US, the world's largest consumer, and Russia, among the largest producers.
But Alekperov's trip to the US as part of Putin's entourage may partly be in the hope that the Bush administration could help Lukoil with a crucial oil interest outside Russia: the huge West Qurna field in Iraq.
Lukoil is among several foreign companies that negotiated contracts and memorandums of understanding with the government of Saddam Hussein to develop oil fields once UN sanctions were lifted. The sanctions are now gone, but so is the old government. Lukoil and the other companies now worry that the agreements they spent years and millions of dollars to develop will be abrogated by the new Iraqi authorities.
People close to Putin and Alekperov said that they expected Putin to raise the question of protecting the Russian oil contracts with US President GEorge W. Bush during their weekend meeting at Camp David.
"The Iraqi question will clearly be on the agenda of the summit," Alekperov said in an interview in New York on Thursday evening. "I think the president of a country and the government should help their own companies."
Russian-owned Lukoil Oil Co acquired Getty Petroleum and its 1,300 US gasoline stations in November 2000, and the Manhattan station is one of about 150 in the US Northeast that Lukoil will rebrand over the next two years.
Bright red Lukoil flags fluttered and US and Russian security men in dark suits held photographers and reporters at bay as Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, greeted Putin at the curb of the full-service station, then accompanied him inside where bills are paid and beverages and snacks are sold.
"When I showed the president of Russia a Krispy Kreme doughnut and he ate it and said it was good, that was one of the more surreal moments I've had in politics," Schumer reported.
Putin made no public remarks and stayed only 10 minutes.
After Putin's motorcade roared off, Schumer, noting that Russia is not a member of OPEC and so Lukoil is not bound by its price-boosting output limits, said: "The more competition there is in oil, particularly against OPEC, the better New York will do and the better America will do."
He said New Yorkers should not expect immediate reductions in their gas prices but said: "I hope OPEC is hurt by this so they don't have the stranglehold any more."
Only a few pedestrians stopped to check out the scene from across the street -- one laughed and shouted "Who cares?" when told the Russian president was coming -- and a couple of vehicles tried to pull into the station for refueling, scores of security vans and police cars notwithstanding.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS