Weekly Bitumen Report: The Variety of Crises and Growing Trend of Bitumen Price

Different international crises were affecting the bitumen market during the last week.

The crisis in Ukraine and the possibility of a military attack by Russia that is still a potential threat let the oil price get stable in the channel of 90 US dollars and even occasionally it touched the level of 95 US dollars for a few hours in some days.

On the other hand, USA's plan to produce Shale oil did not lead to a significant fall in oil price and it is still expected that crude oil prices increase more.

The eighth round of JCPOA negotiations still is going on in Vienna. Based on the obtained data, the Iranian and American parties have come to the latest phases of their negotiations and its final results will have a direct impact on the export prices of Iran commodities.

The chain of heavy competition on vacuum bottom among the Iranian refineries is getting stronger and the range of 16.5 – 34 % was recorded in the last week.

As it was consecutively mentioned in the last two Friday articles of Infinity Galaxy, the imbalance of bitumen rates between India and global rates turned to a server jump of prices in India, and on 15 Feb., the Indian refineries increased bitumen price by about 63 US dollar per metric ton that is a rare increase of bitumen prices in India.

The critical and complicated situation of Indian customs and its effects on the shipping industries has had a deep impact on the packed bitumen market in India and during the last 10 days, the volume of exported bulk bitumen was considerably high.

It seems that the shortage of packed bitumen, specifically drum packing, and high demand of India will lead to another surge of rates by 1 March too.

The coming demands from East Asia are still high and it seems that current rates of the market are workable for the buyers while these rates were on the higher side for them in the last few weeks.

Although the various international crises are affecting the market of bitumen, it is expected that record-breaking in bitumen price and its upward trend goes ahead strongly and no negative or downward signal is observed.

This article was prepared by Razieh Gilani, the sales manager of Infinity Galaxy (www.infinintygalaxy.org).

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