Unipec has carried out a tanker chartering blitz as China looks to continue its record level of monthly crude oil imports.
The trading arm of state oil major Sinopec is reported to have fixed six vessels recently, according to Clarkson Platou Securities.
Five of the six ships were fixed from West Africa, in what the brokerage said was a “considerably long trade compared to those coming from the Middle East”.
Clarkson Platou Securities said that its brokers report “firm fixing activity” and that VLCCs continued to see improving rates in all basins, assessing earnings up to $35,500 per day.
Earlier this week TradeWinds reported that China’s crude oil imports in December surged nearly 30% from a year earlier.
They were 43.7mt, or 10.3m barrels per day (bpd), holding above the 10m-bpd for the second consecutive month, according to the data from the General Administration of Chinese Customs.
For the whole of 2018, China’s crude oil imports rose 10.1% year-on-year to a record 461.9mt, or 9.24mbpd making it the top crude oil importer for the second year running.
Unipec was responsible for almost one in every nine dirty spot charters in 2018, according to figures compiled by Poten & Partners
It carried out 985 fixtures last year out of an industry total of 10,515 reflecting China’s dominance of the tanker industry.
It shipped an estimated 217.1mt of crude last year, or 14.7% of all dirty cargoes, up from 13.8% in 2017, nearly triple that of its nearest rival Shell.
In the VLCC segment, Unipec continued to dominate, with 703 reported fixtures, more than the second through eighth largest VLCC charterers combined.
