MikeLigalig.com

By Amy R. Remo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Retailers of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) Sunday said they may be forced to stop selling cooking gas should the government continue to impose price caps on petroleum products until next month.

“We are opposing [Executive Order No. 839] because there is another pending increase coming from the international market next month,” LPG Marketers Association (LPGMA) president Arnel Ty said in a phone interview.

Although it was still too early to determine the exact increase for next month, Ty said his group was expecting the international contract price of LPG to increase by $30 to $40 per metric ton in December due largely to a surge in demand during Christmas.
“If the EO is still in place, we may have a problem because no business would want to sell at a loss. The risk then is us being forced not to sell LPG products so as not to incur huge losses,” Ty said.

EO 839 has frozen prices of petroleum products in Luzon at their Oct. 15 levels due to the devastation wrought by storms in a large swath of the country’s main island.

At the Oct. 15 levels, prices of an 11-kilogram LPG tank should be between P530 and P580.

Ty said member companies had been supporting the implementation of the executive order since last month, even if LPG’s international contract price rose by $75 to $660 per MT in November, compared with the previous month’s level.

“We admit that we have moved our price upward, but still based on the legal amount of the suggested retail price (SRP). We just followed the highest SRP as of Oct. 15, which was P580 per tank,” Ty said.

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