The nation's two oil refiners said they would keep wholesale gasoline prices stable for the moment, after US light crude yesterday surged to a 13-year high of US$38.98 a barrel.
"We will fix our wholesale prices at the current level at least to the end of this month," Liao Tsang-long (
The company doesn't rule out the possibility of raising prices next month if crude prices remain high, Liao said.
Chinese Petroleum, a state-run refiner with nearly 70 percent market share, has hiked its wholesale gasoline and diesel prices three times this year to reflect soaring costs.
The company's latest price adjustment came on March 25, when gasoline prices rose from NT$21.5 to NT$23.7 per liter, and diesel prices from NT$16 to NT$16.5 per liter. The prices are 9 percent to 10 percent higher than they were at the end of last year.
Chinese Petroleum may consider raising prices again only when crude oil hits US$40 a barrel, Liao said, although he said that was unlikely to happen in the near future. The last time crude oil hit the US$40-level was 14 years ago in the runup to the Gulf War.
"The soaring prices are simply a result of psychological sentiment in the market rather than the real supply of oil," Liao said. "In this way, we'd rather keep the current rate and not hike prices again and risk triggering inflation."
For the first four months of the year, Chinese Petroleum reported pre-tax revenue of NT$5.8 billion, nearly 56 percent of its annual goal of NT$10.4. Liao refused to comment on whether Chinese Petroleum's pricing policy would dent the company's finances for the second half of the year.
The nation's second-largest oil refiner, Formosa Petrochemical Corp (
"We know that costs have been significantly increasing, but we need to maintain the rate to compete with Chinese Petroleum ... Furthermore, our bright performance in the first quarter can help us to hold up the policy," Lin said.
Formosa Petrochemical had net income of NT$9.65 billion for the first quarter of the year, a 129 percent jump from the same period last year and 51.33 percent of the company's annual forecast.
The company raised its after-tax profit forecast for the year to NT$25.92 billion, 39.48 percent up from its previous prediction.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS