RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – China’s decision to impose 10% tariffs on U.S. crude oil imports opens a “window of opportunity” for Brazil to increase its oil shipments to the Asian country, the head of Brazil’s main oil lobby group IBP said on Tuesday.
Brazil last year was the seventh-largest supplier of oil to China, with an average of 720,000 barrels per day, according to StoneX data through September.
“There can actually be an increase,” IBP’s Roberto Ardenghy told Reuters on the sidelines of an event in Rio de Janeiro.
About 30% of oil exports from Brazil’s state-run oil firm Petrobras went to China in the fourth quarter of last year, said the firm on Monday, down from 44% in the same period of 2023.
The tariffs create a “market asymmetry” that could lead to increased sales “opportunistically” for Petrobras in China, the company’s head of logistics and commercialization, Claudio Schlosser, told reporters at the event.
But the change is not structural and could be reverted, he noted.
(Reporting by Fabio Teixeira)
