Even at US$115 a barrel, oil is priced too low, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in comments published yesterday, adding that the commodity “should find its real value.”
“Oil at US$115 a barrel in today’s market is a deceiving figure, oil is a strategic commodity and should find its real value,” the state broadcaster’s Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying on Friday.
New York’s benchmark contract, light sweet crude for delivery in May, surged US$1.83 to a record close of US$116.69 a barrel on Friday.
It had earlier hit an intra-day all-time peak of US$117.
Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari, whose country is OPEC’s No. 2 oil producer and exporter, rejected on Wednesday calls from oil consuming countries for the cartel to take action to bring down prices.
“The oil price has reached US$114 a barrel. When the price is suitable and supply is higher than demand, this shows the reason is somewhere else and we should deal with this other reason,” he said.
OPEC — which produces 40 percent of the world’s oil — has refused to raise its daily output quota, which is fixed at 29.67 million barrels.
Ahmadinejad said the sharp fall in the value of the US dollar was a driving force behind the rise in oil prices.
“The dollar is no longer money, they just print a bunch of paper, which is circulated in the world without any commodity backing,” he said.
Late last year, Iran announced it had stopped carrying out its oil transactions in dollars.
“At the moment, selling oil in dollars has been completely halted, in line with the policy of selling crude in non-dollar currencies,” Nozari was quoted as saying in December.
The world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, Iran has massively reduced its dependence on the US dollar during last year in the face of US pressure on its financial system amid the standoff over its nuclear program.
On Thursday, OPEC announced that the price of oil sold by its members had hit a record-high of US$106.65 per barrel.
The oil ministers from the 12-nation cartel will be joined by chief executives of major producers as some 500 delegates assemble for the International Energy Forum in Rome today.
Pressure for a rise in the cartel’s output ceiling is likely to intensify as the record crude prices weigh down on a slowing world economy.
Also see: OIL: Oil hits record high after attack on Nigeria pipeline
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
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) forecast that its wafer shipments this quarter would grow up to 7 percent sequentially and the factory utilization rate would rise to 75 percent, indicating that customers did not alter their ordering behavior due to the US President Donald Trump’s capricious US tariff policies. However, the uncertainty about US tariffs has weighed on the chipmaker’s business visibility for the second half of this year, UMC chief financial officer Liu Chi-tung (劉啟東) said at an online earnings conference yesterday. “Although the escalating trade tensions and global tariff policies have increased uncertainty in the semiconductor industry, we have not
RSS