Major oil producer Saudi Aramco was still keen to invest in a joint venture with Indian Oil, Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum, but Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company is still in the early stages of that investment, said N Vijaygopal, director of finance, BPCL, in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

About Saudi Aramco’s investment in Reliance Industries’ chemical and refining business, Vijaygopal said, “We don’t comment on Reliance’s decision but of course it is a company-specific decision taken by RIL based on their own outlook."

"They are predominantly a company which exports petroleum products, we are a domestic player. So RIL is not a competition for BPCL,” he said, adding that “Our outlook is that our country will continue to grow in consumption of petroleum products in foreseeable future. Reliance may have a different view or they may have their own compulsions to probably offer a part of it to reduce the debt level.”.

Talking about Q1 numbers, he said refining margins in the first quarter were lower because industry global trends were lower and they do not expect any significant improvement in the second quarter. However, going forward there would be an improvement in Q3 and Q4, he said.

He said although the company’s market share has improved for both motor spirit (MS) and high spirit diesel (HSD) but in general, there has been muted growth in consumption, especially for diesel that has grown on 0.5 percent year on year.

With regards to cracks, he said the company has gone higher crack spreads on HSD but it is still lower by USD 2-3 per barrel year on year. While MS crack spread is lower due to global weak trends.

The marketing margins for the company are expected to be a normalised level and they do not expect any under or over recovery.

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