Saudi Arabia's crude exports to its four biggest Asian buyers are falling fast, and the latest cuts are now too deep for price tweaks alone to fix. Chinese nominations for June have dropped to about 600,000 barrels per day, while India, Japan and South Korea have each reduced loadings by 30 to 35 percent over two months.
The slump is most striking in China, where nominations for June are half of April levels and barely a third of February's 1.6 million barrels per day. Sinopec has cut its monthly offtake from 10 million barrels in February to 2 million in June, a sign that the pullback is moving beyond one buyer and into the core of Saudi Arabia's Asian market.
That matters now because the kingdom had already shifted more of its crude flow to the Red Sea after Aramco's East-West Pipeline hit full capacity on March 10. With the pipeline maxed out, Aramco rerouted the bulk of Saudi exports through Yanbu, leaving the company exposed to a demand problem rather than a transit problem. reported on May 11 that Saudi crude exports to China are projected at roughly 600,000 barrels per day for June, down from about 1.2 million in April and 1.6 million in February.
The broader regional picture points the same way. South Korean loadings from Saudi Arabia in May are projected at about 530,000 barrels per day, down 32 percent from 780,000 in April. Indian imports have fallen to roughly 450,000 barrels per day, a drop of 33 percent from April, while Japan booked only two Saudi cargoes for May, equal to about 130,000 barrels per day. The International Energy Agency said in its April Oil Market Report that Chinese seaborne crude imports from all origins fell by 3.6 million barrels per day between February and April, calling it the largest demand shock to Asian crude markets since the COVID collapse. Across the same period, Japan lost 1.9 million barrels per day, South Korea 1 million, and India 760,000 barrels per day from all suppliers.
The tension for Aramco is that the usual explanation for weaker Saudi flows — fear over Hormuz and shipping routes — no longer holds on its own. The company has already moved more crude through Yanbu because the East-West Pipeline is full, and Asian refiners are increasingly standardizing on cheaper Russian, Iraqi and Emirati grades. That leaves pricing as the only lever, but it is a blunt one. Arab Light's June 2026 Official Selling Price for Asia was set at $15.50 per barrel above the Oman/Dubai average, down $4.00 from May's record $19.50 premium, yet still far above the $2 to $3 norm that held through 2023 and 2024. Saudi Arabia can trim the premium, but the numbers now suggest it cannot cut enough to win back buyers without hitting revenues it can ill afford to lose.
The result is a fiscal trap as much as a market one. A -style reading of the month ahead is simple: unless Saudi Arabia changes its pricing strategy more aggressively, the slide in Asian demand is likely to keep dragging on exports, even as the kingdom keeps its barrels moving west through Yanbu.
