Chinese gasoline traders and manufacturers urged the government to ease price controls blamed for shortages in Shanghai, the nation's commercial center, and provinces including Guangdong, the biggest manufacturing hub.
Some retailers are limiting sales to avoid losses because they can't pass soaring supply costs on to customers, industry officials including Liu Jian, chairman of the Shandong-based Oil Product Trading Association of Qingdao, said yesterday.
An increase in gasoline prices would boost manufacturing costs and inflation in China. The nation's economy has tripled in a decade to US$1.6 trillion, more than doubling fuel demand and contributing to the surge in crude oil costs for refiners such as China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, Asia's largest.
"There's a greater need for the government to reform the current oil pricing structure, which is not moving fast enough with the market and international oil prices," Zhang Jingming, company secretary at Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co, a unit of China Petroleum & Chemical, said by phone.
The National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic policy planning ministry, controls fuel prices, allowing fluctuations of no more than 8 percent from the set level. The commission raised the price of 90 RON grade gasoline in Guangdong 16 percent this year to 4 yuan (US$0.49) a liter, lagging behind the 68 percent surge in the price of Dubai crude oil, Asia's benchmark.
The commission sent "significant additional" supplies to Guangdong to help cope with the crisis, China Central Television reported, quoting Li Yang, a commission official.
"We're sending truckloads of petrol to Guangdong, far exceeding the province's consumption needs," Li said in an interview on CCTV. "We hear the lines of cars waiting to buy gasoline have started shrinking."
Any decision to raise fuel prices further may accelerate inflation, increasing China's consumer price index by as much as 0.6 percentage points, and induce refiners to produce more gasoline, JPMorgan Chase & Co economist Ben Simpfendorfer said in a report on Thursday.
China's inflation accelerated in July for the first time in five months after the government raised fuel and electricity prices. The consumer price index climbed 1.8 percent from a year earlier after rising 1.6 percent in June, according to Beijing- based Mainland Marketing Research Co (China), which releases figures for the statistics bureau.
Energy companies' profits have been squeezed as price controls prevented them from passing higher crude oil and coal costs on to consumers.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
RSS