Indian company offers best bid to import heavy naphtha from BPC

India's Swiss Singapore Overseas Enterprises Pte Ltd has offered, for the first time, the best bid to import 170,000 barrels of heavy naphtha from state-run Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) following a re-tendering, a senior BPC official told the FE Thursday.
He said the BPC is set to award its June loading cargo of heavy naphtha to the Swiss Singapore Overseas as the trader submitted the most competitive bid at a premium of US$0.10 per barrel to the Mean of Platts Singapore (MOPS) naphtha assessments.
MOPS is a benchmark for international oil pricing. With the discount offer the BPC would get the naphtha selling price at lower rate by US$0.10 per barrel from international price.
Swiss Singapore is a trading company of Mumbai-based Aditya Birla Group.
Swiss's bid was the highest of seven other bids submitted in the tender process by the close of deadline Wednesday.
The 170,000 barrel naphtha parcel is for loading, over June 24-26 from Chittagong port on free on board (FOB) basis.
The tender closed on June 10 and bids will remain valid until June 17.
Among other bidders, Unipec Singapore offered a discount of $0.75 per barrel to MOPS naphtha assessments, Trafigura a discount of $1.95 per barrel, and Itochu a discount of $4.00 per barrel to MOPS naphtha assessments.
The BPC official said that the tender would be awarded to Swiss Singapore pending approval from board directors at a meeting to be held next week.
The official said the initial bidding for June loading to sell 170,000 barrels of naphtha was suspended due to lower than expected quantity of available naphtha.
The BPC had issued the previous tender in late April with the bid submission deadline of May 5, validity up to May 12 and loading over May 24-26 from Chittagong, FOB.
But the BPC postponed it as the naphtha output from the state-run Eastern Refinery Ltd (ERL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of BPC, was lower than expected, said the official.
BPC gets naphtha from the ERL as a by-product after refining crude oil.
Apart from exporting, BPC also sells naphtha domestically to privately owned petrochemical companies.
Before starting the sale of naphtha to private petrochemical companies, BPC used to export around 170,000 barrels of naphtha every alternate month.
Currently it exports naphtha almost in every quarter after meeting local demand.
BPC last sold an identical volume of naphtha to Unipec Singapore for loading from Chittagong over March 11-13 loading at a discount of $0.39 per barrel to the MOPS naphtha assessments on FOB.
    mazizur.rahman@outlook.com