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Petrol price cut by VND500/litre
As of 12:00 am on October 8, the retail petrol price will decrease by VND500/litre to VND16,500/litre.
The plan to slash retail petrol price was submitted by key petrol importers yesterday and was approved this afternoon by the Head of the Petrol and Oil Price Control Taskforce, Nguyen Tien Thoa.
The retail petrol price cut was made when the crude oil price decreased dramatically in the world markets to the 8-month low of $88/barrel.
In Singapore, the main supplier of petrol to Vietnamese importers, the finished oil and petrol products’ prices have been reduced to below $100/barrel. With such an import price, importers would make the profit of VND3,000/litre of petrol after paying a transport fee, storage fee, import tax and VAT.
The VND500/litre decrease in the petrol price proves to be smaller than expected. Explaining the modest decrease, petrol importers said that the oil price decreases are not big enough to offset the losses they incurred in the last months when they had to keep the price of petrol stable, despite the fact that the oil price once surged to $140/barrel.
The VND500/litre cut was made after distributors considered the price tendency in the world markets in the upcoming month and calculated their profit in 2008.
An official from Petrolimex said that it is still very difficult to forecast the price performance in the world markets as the prices are influx all of the time. Therefore, he said, petrol importers and distributors have been keeping cautious when deciding to slash prices. “However, in case the world’s crude oil price continues going down, we will cut prices further,” he said.
VNN
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