For the last several months, Platts' Hong Kong correspondent Winnie Lee has been pulling together the disparate flow of data out of China to put together a single Chinese demand figure.
Up until about a year ago, that figure might have been the most significant one in the entire oil industry, as it was Chinese demand that was one key factor in propelling prices to their record levels of last July.
With the world oil market now in surplus, the world doesn't hang on Chinese demand figures as it once did. But that will assuredly change.
Beginning this month, Platts is releasing that figure to the general public by way of a press release. We believe it will become the number most widely watched and recognized by people trying to get a handle on just how much oil is being consumed in China.
So for this month, Platts reported that China consumed 31.26 million metric tons of crude in March, down just 0.25% from March 2008. It doesn't sound like much, but a decline of even a quarter of a point certainly stands in stark contrast to the double-digit gains consistently being put up for several years through the middle of 2008. But more significantly, the first quarter figure was down 4.8% from the same period a year earlier.
We calculate China's apparent demand on the basis of crude throughput volues at domestic refineries and net oil product imports. The data comes from the General Administration of Customs and the National Bureau of Statistics.
We hope you'll find this data helpful in the coming months.
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