China’s Sinopec Corp has ended a five-year crude oil purchasing strategy to rein in the speculative derivatives activity of its trading arm Unipec after a record trading loss late last year, four people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Sinopec, Asia’s largest crude oil buyer and its largest refiner, in January abandoned a buying formula used since 2014 to establish performance targets for Unipec and aimed at driving down its crude feedstock costs to a pre-set discount to global oil benchmarks. Under the strategy, Unipec had raked in a total 16.6 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) in net profit between 2014 and 2017, including a record year in 2016 at 6.17 billion yuan, according to Sinopec’s annual reports. The formula-based cost target, though, […]