The production of local refineries declined by 8 percent to 6.8 million tons in 10 months of the current fiscal year FY10. The local refineries produced 689,000 tons in April this year, with a decline of 11.6 percent over the same period of last year.
International petroleum product increased in the range of 2 percent to 7 percent on monthly basis (HSFO 2 percent) (gasoil 7 percent) during March 2010, as against 5 percent increase in crude oil prices in the Arabian Gulf region. "This in turn reflected positively in domestic refineries' GRMs (gross refinery margin) for April 2010", Nauman Khan, an analyst at Invest Capital and Securities said.
"As per our estimates, April 2010 GRMs stood at $1.70/bbl, up 5 percent, on month-on-month basis", he added. Among individual companies, Pakistan Refinery (PRL) witnessed an increase of 175 percent to $0.10/bbl primarily on account of low base-effect. However, the major beneficiary was National Refinery (NRL), registering an increase of a massive 25 percent ($1.93/bbl) in its core GRMs to $1.93/bbl in April 2010.
This, coupled with company's already profitable lube business, would help boost three company's bottomline in the fourth quarter of FY10. On the flip side, Attock Refinery (ATR) GRMs are expected to take a dip to stand at $0.24/bbl while BYCO also registered a decline of 6 percent, but still posted strong GRMs at $3.35/bbl.
"With the recent revision of petroleum prices in May 2010, we estimate domestic GRMs will decline by 26 percent on monthly basis to $1.25/bbl", he said. "Amongst the individual companies, we expect ATRL's margins to re-emerge from red to stand at $1.53/bbl, with NRL, BYCO and PRL's GRMs anticipated to come down to $0.86/bbl, $2.3/bbl and -$0.94/bbl respectively", he added.
He said that the industry's capacity utilisation stood at 62 percent, with divergent trends among the individual companies. Among the listed companies, ATRL operated around 75 percent of its capacity, whereas PRL, NRL and BYCO's throughput stood at 61 percent, 46 percent and 44 percent respectively.
In terms of market shares, Parco continued to be the market leader with 40 percent share while the residual was divided among PRL, ATRL, NRL and BOSI and others by 17 percent, 17 percent, 15 percent, 8 percent and 1 percent respectively.