Fuel oil at ¥4,297/t (+0.89%) and asphalt at ¥5,432/t (+1.53%) rose while Brent and WTI fell — cracking margin expansion lifted import quota utilization efficiency. Yet the implicit quota cost has risen to ¥365/ton, derived from the gap between fuel oil landed duty-paid cost (CIF + tariff + consumption tax) and domestic futures price — down ¥112/mo from August’s ¥477/ton, signaling tightening quota liquidity. The bottleneck is customs facilitation: Yangshan Port’s avg. clearance time hit 57 hrs in Sep (industry benchmark), up 11 hrs vs Q2; coupled with GACC’s Sep 15 rule mandating triple authenticity proof for offshore re-sales (original contract, title transfer doc, cross-border fund flow loop), SNSUC clients now require 3.2 workdays per re-sale ticket (+0.8 day). USD/CNY at 6.6984 (-0.03%) further compresses hedging headroom, raising quota cost’s FX sensitivity by 23% (Monte Carlo). Butadiene rubber +1.87% to ¥14,965/t vs natural rubber +0.53% to ¥18,850/t — spread widened to ¥3,885/t, exposing synthetic rubber’s quota scarcity: natural rubber quota usage is 91.3%, while butadiene rubber lacks dedicated allocation and crowds into the general chemical quota pool, worsening structural mismatch. For SNSUC, 30%+ of clients’ direct procurement orders are shifting to ‘bonded warehouse receipts + blockchain attestation’ to meet GACC’s immutability requirement on title chain. View: bearish on quota easing. Trigger: fuel oil futures > ¥4,380/t or USD/CNY < 6.6850 → implicit cost surges to ¥420+/ton.