Asia's naphtha cracks hit a two-week low of $29.40 a tonne on Friday on subdued demand while gasoline crack rose to its highest since January 8 on pockets of buying interest. Although still persisting at discount levels, the current gasoline crack at 13 cents a barrel sharply contrasted with the discount of 97 cents in the previous day. Strong demand was seen from India and this has prompted BPCL to seek 35,000 tonnes of spot gasoline cargo to plug the gap.

Counterpart HPCL was also looking to buy a total of 900,000 tonnes of gasoline under a term contract spanning from April to December. But overall, India remains a net exporter of gasoline. Coming refinery maintenance in parts of Asia and elections in Indonesia and India may see fundamentals improving for sellers. For now however, gasoline stocks were still abundant across regions of Singapore, Europe and the United States.

Although gasoline stocks held independently at the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) refining and storage hub have fallen to a six-week low of 1.34 million tonnes in the week to Thursday, this was only 3.3 percent below the record high volume of nearly 1.39 million tonnes in late March 2018, data from Dutch consultancy PJK International showed.

Copyright Reuters, 2019