Higher oil prices helped raise Sinopec’s third-quarter earnings by 64% from a year earlier, even as China’s top refiner couldn’t fully capture the record-high global refining margins.
China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, as Sinopec is officially known, said on Thursday that its profit attributable to the shareholders of the company surged by 63.6% on the year to $2 billion (13.6 billion Chinese yuan) for the third quarter.
Revenues rose by 9.3% to $115 billion (769.7 billion yuan).
For the first nine months of 2026, profit rose by 25.3% and revenues by 4.4%, Sinopec said in a stock exchange filing.
The Chinese giant attributed the rise in the January-September results to its decision to increase the yield of high value-added products such as jet fuel and refining by-products, and inventory gains resulting from the higher crude oil prices.
Sinopec’s realized crude oil price jumped to $81.92 per barrel in the nine months from $66.38 a barrel for the same period last year, while production was basically flat year-over-year.
Sinopec, however, flagged flailing domestic fuel demand this year.
This, plus Chinese controls of fuel exports in the spring and the summer, ultimately prevented the refiner from capturing the full upside in global refining margins, as international supermajors did.
“Due to the dampening effect of high oil prices on demand and accelerated substitution by new energy, domestic refined oil products consumption declined by 8.6% year on year,” Sinopec said.
“Domestic demand for major chemical products was weak, with ethylene equivalent consumption down by 9.4% year on year.”
Sinopec’s refinery throughput slumped by 10.2% in January-September from a year earlier.
Another major state-owned company, PetroChina, also benefited from the higher oil prices, but its refinery runs and domestic diesel sales also fell.
Earlier this week, PetroChina reported a 21.6% increase in its third-quarter profit on Iran war-inflated oil and gas prices, while the company’s nine-month crude output, refinery runs and domestic diesel sales all fell.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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