Matthieu Favas
speaker
190 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 12 Aug
Matthieu Favas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Between February and April, China slashed its imports of crude oil by half.
And to give you an order of magnitude, it's more than five percent of global demand.
So it's a huge amount.
It's so huge in fact that people think it's probably as seven thirty dollars of the price of brands, which is the global oil price benchmark.
It didn't do that in the interest of the global citizen.
It did it because it was in its interest.
And that's because before the war, China was the single biggest buyer of Gulf oil.
And from late April, it stopped receiving cargoes from the Gulf because Hormuz was closed.
It needed that oil, but it realized it maybe it did not need that much.
And so by slashing its imports, it brought the price down and also the volumes were smaller.
So its import bill was overall smaller than before the war.
In a few main ways, one thing to know first about China is that it has huge, absolutely massive stocks of oil.
China's been building those stockpiles for years across a lot of other commodities too, from copper to grain, and that's to prepare for a time when a shock might be coming or they might be isolated themselves.
In the twelve months to early 2026, it made these stocks even bigger.
by adding something like 200 million barrels to stocks that were already at around one billion barrels.
And when the war started, first it stopped adding to the stocks.
And because it was buying too much before, that already made a difference to the amount it imported.
And then from late April, when the cargo stopped coming from the Gulf, it started drawing from the stocks.
One thing to note is these stocks were not necessarily state owned stocks, they were commercial stocks owned by profit seeking divisions of big oil firms.
But the biggest oil firms in China are all state owned, so the distinction is not very clear.
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