Around 217,000 tons of various commodities were offered by forty local suppliers on Iran Mercantile Exchange’s trading floors during Saturday trading.
According IME public relations, the oil and petrochemical trading floor played host to 34,000 tons of vacuum bottoms offered by Bandar Abbas Oil Refining Company, Shiraz Oil Refining Company, Tehran Oil Refining Company and Esfahan Oil Refining Company. In addition, Pasargad Oil Company and Jey Oil Company listed 51,200 tons of various grades of bitumen on the board. Moreover, the floor registered the offering of 18,000 tons of lube-cut oil.
The floor also featured 31,443 tons of polymers and chemicals offered by local petrochemical complexes. Mono styrene butadiene rubber, styrene monomer, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, sulfur, ammonium, p-Xylene, polyethylene, poly butadiene rubber, poly vinyl chloride, toluene diisocyanate, and caustic soda were among the chief commodities supplied there.
The export trading floor played host to 15,060 tons of bitumen 6070, and the agricultural trading floor featured 43,300 tons of corn and 15,760 tons of rice in a relatively lousy trading day at the IME.
Lopsided Price Policies
Unification of forex rates is essential for both imports and sales of petrochemical commodities; according to market analyst, Nasrin Niazi. “Currently, petrochemical complexes tend to sell their products to local customers based on free market prices, however, importers can receive allocations from the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) to import the same goods at official exchange rate, which is close to 20 percent less than the free market price,” Niazi noted.
Lopsided policies on petrochemical prices as well as a surge in imports have caused local suppliers to lose the ground to imported goods.
