Petroleum products diverged this morning: front-month fuel oil at ¥3,650/t (-0.54%) versus bitumen at ¥4,610/t (+0.30%), widening bitumen's premium over fuel oil to roughly ¥960/t. Platform reference prices for base oil, lubricants, paraffin wax and petroleum coke stand at ¥7,939, ¥12,652, ¥7,983 and ¥2,383/t. With Brent at $88.33/bbl and USD/CNY at 6.7349, feedstock costs are relatively stable, so the widening spread reflects demand mix - road construction and waterproofing support bitumen, while bunker and industrial fuel demand stay soft at the tail of the low season.

More important than the spread is the change in how this trade is regulated. Qingdao's 2026 Cross-Border Trade Facilitation Action Plan calls for a smart regulatory service platform for international vessel bunkering, one-stop approvals and integrated supervision, deeper 'one ship, multiple suppliers' and cross-terminal bonded bunker supply, and support for bonded bunker business at airports; imported fuel oil moves to category-based periodic sampling while imported crude gains acceptance of inspection results and release-before-inspection. Zhoushan's 2026-2030 action plan targets 55 million cubic metres of oil storage and 4.5 million of LNG capacity by 2030, deepens futures-spot cooperation with exchanges and aims to raise the influence of its fuel oil price index. Shanghai's logistics plan, meanwhile, commits to stronger trade support for bonded bunker fuel, LNG, green methanol and hydrogen-based energy.

Together these turn the terminal from a logistics node into a pricing variable. 'One ship, multiple suppliers' lets several suppliers bunker the same vessel, spreading the fixed costs of a single stem - pilotage, berthing and inspection waiting time. Cross-terminal supply lets traders shop tank capacity and laycans within a region instead of being locked to one port area. Category-based periodic sampling means firms and grades with clean compliance records face lower sampling frequency and shorter waiting time - and in practice the cost saved on sampling and demurrage is often no smaller than the concession room in a price negotiation.

Three actions for SNSUC's petroleum-products line (fuel oil, bitumen, base oil, lubricants, paraffin wax and petroleum coke). First, upgrade the quote model from 'cargo value plus freight' to 'cargo value plus freight plus terminal cost', putting berth waiting, sampling cycles and tank rent explicitly on the sheet - especially while the fuel oil-bitumen spread is wide, terminal cost alone can reorder relative returns across grades. Second, let digital warrants carry sampling and inspection records: hash inspection reports, certificates of origin and title in the same batch so buyers can verify authenticity through a browser-side SHA-256 fingerprint without requesting originals, in line with the policy direction of smart supervision plus automated verification. Third, build terminal redundancy for seasonal grades such as bitumen and paraffin: within the scope allowed by cross-terminal supply, reserve a second tank and a second laycan to lock the risk premium of peak-season logistics bottlenecks in advance. Our conclusion: in the second half of 2026, profit dispersion in petroleum-product re-export will come more from logistics and compliance efficiency than from procurement spreads alone.