Petrobras’ pricing policy is good for the country, says Prates

According to Prates, the new strategy responds, not to a direct request, but to the political construction process of the campaign in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defended “the ingenious phrase ‘Brazilianize’ prices”.

“Abrasileirando prices is to consider parameters of Brazil in the formation of prices. For our part, these Brazilian parameters are Petrobras itself, which produces here, delivers here and has advantages here. It didn’t make sense for us to match anyone who imports from anywhere, which doesn’t mean that the market isn’t competitive, so much so that today we compete with any refinery in the world. And any refinery in the world has the right to bring product into Brazil to sell to anyone here,” said Prates, in a meeting with journalists at Petrobras’ Research, Development and Innovation Center Leopoldo Américo Miguez de Mello, on Ilha do Fundão, in the north zone of Rio.

According to Prates, the new commercial strategy is a great victory because the company was able to correctly explain and provide transparency to the process. “Some said I would have to say exactly how the price is formed. No price, for cotton swabs, condensed milk, lettuce, has this so-called transparency. It’s not transparency. It is a breakdown of price formation. We have transparency, because it is known, and any control entity can identify this, how our price is formed to reach each final product from the delivery point”, he added.

“It is a victory for us to have managed to Brazilianize prices and our contribution to this because we are a national producer. With this, we stabilized this volatility. We are currently experiencing upward and downward volatility. Last week there was an uptrend and this week we already had a downtrend again, so you can see that the policy makes sense. We avoid going through this turmoil unnecessarily and we don’t lose money,” he concluded.

In the evaluation of the president of Petrobras, the import parity price policy, called PPI, did not reflect, neither for the company, nor for Brazil, the most appropriate price. And several aspects need to be considered, such as the types of refineries and logistics for delivering products to different markets.

According to Prates, there is a difference between the national fuel policy and the commercial strategy of Petrobras, which is one of the companies that participate in the market. “We don’t make a price policy for Brazil, we make a commercial strategy for our products in our refineries, so these are our prices.”