The Asian naphtha price rose for the first time this week to reach a three-session high of $867.75 a tonne on Friday, with its margin edging up to a two-session high of $88.88 a tonne as a refinery outage in India lifted sentiment. A fire broke out late on Thursday at state-run refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd's 8.3 million tonnes a year Visakhapatnam refinery on India's east coast, officials said.
This led to the shut down of a 3 million tonnes a year crude distillation unit (CDU) at the refinery, but the extent of the damage and losses due to it was not yet known. Vitol has a deal with HPCL to lift up to 30,000 tonnes of naphtha from the refinery on May 25-27.
But the Asian gasoline margin did not react to the fire and in fact fell for the fourth straight session to reach its lowest in about a week of $7.85 a barrel. Cash trades were absent with traders saying there was likely just one bid in the Singapore market against at least three offers. Traders were likely still feeling the effects of weak demand in the US despite upcoming summer driving season. But gasoline stocks independently held in Europe's Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp hub dropped 15.9 percent this week to nearly 900,000 tonnes, data from Dutch oil analyst Pieter Kulsen showed on Thursday.
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