MOSCOW (MRC) -- China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (Sinopec) said its daily sales of refined oil products have resumed to more than 90% of levels seen before the coronavirus outbreak, after it announced the worst quarterly loss on record a day earlier, reported Reuters.
Diesel sales match the level of a year ago, while sales of gasoline have rebounded to 90% and petrochemical products to 86%, of the levels seen last year.
“Fuel and chemical products consumption is expected to further improve with the acceleration of production resumption at companies in China. Supply and demand will be balanced again,” the company said in a statement.
The listed branch of Sinopec on reported a 19.782 billion yuan (USD2.80 billion) net loss in first-quarter earnings under Chinese accounting standards, as the coronavirus pandemic walloped fuel consumption and led to collapsing oil prices.
That was the state-owned oil company’s first quarterly loss since the fourth quarter of 2014 and was the biggest quarterly loss since it went public in 2003, according to Refinitiv Eikon’s records.
The loss compared with net profits in the first quarter of 2019 of 14.76 billion yuan and 14.31 billion yuan in the fourth quarter last year.
Sinopec said its refinery throughput fell 13% year-on-year to 53.74 million tonnes, or about 4.31 million barrels per day (bpd), as the coronavirus curtailed demand for refined oil products.
Its oil refining sector suffered a 25.8 billion yuan loss in the first three months of 2020.
The company said last month it expected lower refining runs for the full year of 2020, but for refined oil consumption to return to normal in the third and fourth quarters.
Utilisation rates at its refineries have been resuming after touching as low as 66% in February.
Crude oil production in the first quarter at Sinopec dipped 0.2% from a year earlier to 70.65 million barrels, while natural gas output fell 2.4% to 249.68 billion cubic feet.
Its realised crude oil prices were USD49.15 per barrel, down 14.8% on year, following the drop in global oil prices triggered by a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Realised natural gas prices were USD6.43 per thousand cubic feet, down 9.2% from a year ago, it reported.
As MRC informed earlier, Sinopec Corp is expected to start commercial operations at its oil refining and petrochemical complex in Zhanjiang at the end of July. The refinery is capable of processing 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil and the petrochemical plant will produce 800,000 tonnes per year of ethylene. The project, with first phase investment of 40 billion yuan ($5.59 billion), is located in southern China’s Guangdong province. The refinery received its first crude oil cargo of 128,900 tonnes from a very large crude carrier (VLCC) that arrived at the plant’s 300,000-tonne capacity berth in early May, Sinopec said on May 9.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 721,290 tonnes in the first four month of 2020, up by 4% year on year. Low density polyethylene (LDPE) and linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) shipments grew partially because of the increased capacity utilisation at ZapSibNeftekhim. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market totalled 347,440 tonnes in January-April 2020 (calculated by the formula production minus export plus import). Supply exclusively of PP random copolymer increased.
China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec Group) is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical enterprise group established in July 1998 on the basis of the former China Petrochemical Corporation. Sinopec Group"s key business activities include the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, petrochemicals and other chemical products, oil refining.
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