Petroleum Intelligence Weekly: Asia Moves from Price Taker to Price Maker

“China has already taken direct control of most of its crude buying, to the extent that state Sinopec’s Unipec trading arm has become the largest fixer of spot tankers in the world based on deadweight tonnage. And much as they are starting to dictate terms for crude deals, Chinese traders’ new dominance of the market for very large crude carriers (VLCCs), accounting for a quarter of the spot market, is allowing them to start driving down freight costs. Unipec transports around 3 million barrels per day of crude back to China, or roughly half the country’s imports, and last year fixed 556 VLCCs, according to data from shipping brokerage Poten & Partners, with CNPC’s subsidiary PetroChina the second biggest player in the VLCC market, fixing 161 vesssels.