Russian duties bring to ruin Belarusian oil workers

As a result of imposing duties on oil and oil products, earnings of the Belarusian crude oil refining industry and petrochemistry have become one-tenth as much.

Since January 2010 Russia applies export duties on oil products supplied to Belarus. Considering that Belarusian enterprises of oil and petrochemical industry use Russian oil products as chemical raw materials, and the effect of Russian duties was not long in coming, “Belorusskiye novosti” write.

As “Belorusskiye novosti” has found out, in Q1 of the Belarusian petrochemical industry’s profitability dropped considerably, by the factor of 10. While in January-March 2009 profits margin of petrochemicals was 9.5%, in Q2 2010 it was 0.9%.

It automatically had an impact on the profit level. In Q 2009 enterprises of the petrochemical industry received income of 25.4 billion rubles of sales profit, and in January-March 2010 this figure in more than 5 times less, 4.8 billion rubles.

Russian duties have influenced the production costs o the petrochemical complex of Belarus as well. In January-March cost of products sold increased by more than 92% as compared to the analogous period of the last year.