Asian naphtha price ends the previous week on a high note

21-May-13

Naphtha price in Asia rose at the end of last week to reach a three-session high of US$867.7/ton with its margin edging up to a two-session high of US$88.8/ton as a refinery outage in India lifted sentiment, as per Reuters. A fire broke out late on Thursday at state-run refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd's 8.3 mln tpa Visakhapatnam refinery on India's east coast. This led to the shudown of a 3 mln tpa 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 tons of naphtha from the refinery on May 25-27.