China, the world's largest oil importer, wants to ease prices on the domestic market. For this, the country sold an undisclosed amount of its strategic crude reserves.

China has announced that it is selling part of its strategic oil reserves, in order to "limit the pressure of rising commodity prices on industrial production", according to a press release published in this context. With its unprecedented strategy, Beijing has introduced additional uncertainty that the markets will have to take into account. Beijing added that such sales were "an important way for (strategic) reserves to play their role in balancing the market", hinting that more auctions could take place in the future. According to the Bloomberg agency, the sale would relate to several million barrels of crude oil to Chinese refineries and petrochemical plants, transactions which date back to July.

Beijing's announcement had a strong impact on the price of Brent, which was trading around 73 dollars, up some 2%. On Friday, US production was still cut by some 1.3 million barrels per day, or around 1% of global supply. US oil inventories fell by 1.5 million barrels in one week while those of gasoline fell by 7.2 million barrels, much more than the 3.3 million expected on average by the market.