Japan's refinery outages and a heavy bout of maintenance have prompted imports of at least three to four 30,000-tonne cargoes of gasoline reformate from Asia for late-April and May, industry sources said on Thursday.
The spurt in imports has boosted the spread between gasoline and naphtha, or the Asian benchmark margin of processing naphtha into reformate, to the widest level in seven months ahead of firm gasoline demand for the driving season, sources said.
"As to the region's gasoline market, it depends on how soon the Japanese refiners can be re-started from outages," a Singapore-based trader said. "A prolonged delay in the start-up will kick-start some more prompt buying interest there."