中国CFR沥青价格构成 · What Makes Up a CFR Bitumen Price into China

CFR报价不是一个数字，而是产品、包装、内陆运输、码头装卸、海运费、检验与单证等成本的合计。海运费与产品最不稳定，检验和单证相对固定。报价按吨报出，海运费却按箱计，因此包装决定每吨运费。质量等级与蜡含量决定所报的是哪种产品。两份报价只有在贸易术语、包装、计价基准、检验安排和有效期一致后才可比。

A CFR price into China is an aggregate, not a rate. It contains the product at the specification actually being supplied, the packing, the inland movement to the load port, terminal handling and stuffing, export formalities, the ocean freight, insurance only where the Incoterm imposes it, the inspection and laboratory schedule the Chinese specification calls for, the document set, and the cost of carrying the payment structure. Two of those components move constantly and most of the rest barely move at all inside a quotation period, which is why two offers for the same tonnage into the same port can differ by far more than any trading margin without either party being dishonest. Underneath that sits a second and less obvious asymmetry: the figure is quoted per tonne but the costs behind it accumulate on three different denominators — per tonne, per container, and per batch or per shipment — so parcel size and packing change the per-tonne answer before anyone has taken a commercial position at all. An offer only becomes comparable once five things have been aligned: the Incoterm and the named port, the packing and unit weight, the net-versus-gross weight basis, the inspection arrangement, and the validity. In the Chinese market a sixth alignment does more work than all the others — the quality class and the wax result behind it, because an A级-capable cargo is a different product from a B级 one and no amount of comparison discipline turns them into the same line item.

The first fact is that CFR carries no insurance. Under Incoterms 2020 the seller contracts and pays carriage to the named port of destination, and delivery — with it the transfer of risk — happens when the goods are on board at the port of shipment. So a CFR number contains a freight component and no premium. CIF is the same cost and risk structure with one obligation added, that the seller procure cargo insurance, and when an offer moves from CFR to CIF the only component that enters the number is that premium. Everything else is unchanged. This is the single most useful thing to know when a CFR offer and a CIF offer are put side by side: the gap between them is not a spread, it is a policy, and the honest comparison is made by adding cover to the CFR side rather than by treating the difference as commercial. One qualification decides whether that adjustment is arithmetic or a second mistake: what CIF obliges the seller to buy is minimum cover, not all-risks. Cover added to the CFR side therefore has to be added at that same level before the two figures sit on one line — price an all-risks policy against a minimum-cover CIF offer and the error has simply been moved to the other side of the sheet. The level of cover each rule imposes is set out on the shipping page and is not argued again here.

The second fact is that the term may be the wrong one for the cargo. CFR and CIF are sea and inland waterway rules that assume a handover on board; a container of drums is handed over at a terminal days before any vessel is involved, and CPT and CIP are the rules that describe that. The trade quotes CFR for containers regardless. For pricing purposes the consequence is narrow — repapering an offer from CFR to CPT moves the risk transfer point and changes nothing in the freight component — but the exposure it opens is not narrow at all. The eleven rules, the cost allocation behind each of them and the CIF-against-CIP difference in the level of cover the seller must buy all sit on the Incoterms page, and are not repeated here.

报价止于何处 · Where the number stops, and what has to be added to both offers

A CFR price ends when the vessel arrives at the named Chinese port under the carriage contract the seller bought. Everything past that point is the buyer's, which matters for comparison in a way that is easy to miss: these costs are not simply absent from the number, they are absent unevenly, so a buyer building a delivered cost has to add them to each offer separately rather than treating them as a common constant.

• Discharge and destination terminal handling, to the extent the carriage contract does not already cover it. This is decided by the liner terms inside the freight contract rather than by the Incoterm, and two sellers buying two different freight contracts can hand the buyer two different destination bills on the same rule.
• Free time, detention and demurrage. The free days attached to each seller's booking differ, and this is the largest of the uneven costs. It is invisible in both numbers and lands on the buyer.
• Clearance, import VAT on goods at 13 %, and whatever the national subheading attracts under HS 2713.20 — a constant across two offers of the same origin, but not across two origins. The classification page covers the mechanics.
• Inland movement in China, which depends on the discharge port each offer names, and for drummed cargo the disposal of the empty steel.

None of this is a criticism of CFR. It is the reason a CFR figure cannot be set against a landed cost, or against a domestic Chinese offer delivered to a plant, until it has been extended to the same endpoint — and the reason the cheaper CFR number is not automatically the cheaper cargo.

波动项 · The components that move

Ocean freight is the volatile component, and it is volatile in a way that has nothing to do with the seller. Container rates respond to space and equipment, to bunker cost, to whether the service is direct or transhipped, to blank sailings and to congestion at either end. A seller writing an offer today is either holding a booked rate, in which case the validity will be short and specific, or estimating one, in which case the validity is a risk position that has been priced. Neither is dishonest. They are different offers.

The product is the second mover, because a binder is a refinery output and follows crude, refinery run and yield. The third is finance, which only becomes visible when the tenor is long: an offer against a deferred payment carries the cost of the money across that period and an offer against payment at sight does not.

稳定项 · The components that barely move

Filling, terminal handling, export formalities, inspection, documentation and the seller's margin are effectively fixed inside a quotation period. Terminal charges follow a published schedule of rates. Inspection is a fee schedule. Documentation is a piece of work that is done once and then exists. Inland haulage sits in between: it is rate-based but carries fuel adjustment and seasonal capacity.

The practical consequence is a diagnostic. If two offers differ by a large amount, the difference is very unlikely to be sitting in the stable components, because they simply do not have that much room in them. It is sitting in the product, in the freight, or in something structural that has not been aligned. Which is worth checking before anybody is accused of overcharging.

三个分母 · A CFR number is quoted per tonne but is not built per tonne

The deepest reason two honest offers diverge is not volatility at all. It is that a CFR quotation is presented as one figure per metric tonne while the costs underneath it accumulate on three different denominators, and the conversion between them is done by the seller, silently, before the buyer ever sees a number.

Per tonne of binder. Only the product genuinely behaves this way, and even it needs two questions answered before the denominator is real. Is the price per tonne of net product, or per tonne gross including packing — on drums the steel is real weight, and the tare treatment belongs in the offer rather than in a later conversation, which the drummed cargo page follows through to the Chinese customs declaration. And where is the quantity determined: weighed at the load port, or counted as units multiplied by a nominal fill? Those are two different numbers and only one is a measurement. On a bulk parcel the same question becomes a temperature question, and the bulk page sets out the quantity clause.

Per container. Ocean freight and terminal handling on containerised cargo are charged per box, not per tonne, so the packing decides the freight share of every tonne before any rate is quoted. A 20-foot FCL carries 12 MT as 80 drums of 150 kg, 14.4 MT as 80 drums of 180 kg, 14.8 MT as 80 drums of 185 kg, 20 MT as 20 one-tonne bags, and 20 to 25 MT in a bitutainer. Read those as divisors rather than as loading data: the same freight rate spread over 12 MT and over 20 MT gives two very different freight components per tonne of binder. A drummed offer and a bagged offer for identical material at an identical margin are structurally required to be different numbers.

Per shipment or per batch. This is the denominator nobody converts, and it explains the arguments that survive after packing has been aligned. Export formalities, the document set, the load-port survey and the laboratory schedule are largely indifferent to how much bitumen is being shipped — a wax determination costs what it costs whether it sits behind one container or forty, and a Chinese-format safety data sheet is prepared once and then exists. On a small parcel those costs land on few tonnes and lift the per-tonne figure; on a large parcel they disappear into the rounding.

Two consequences follow, and they cut in both directions. A buyer who prices a trial container and then expects the same figure at volume has misread which denominator he was quoted on. And a buyer comparing a one-container offer against a multi-container offer is comparing two positions on the same cost curve, not two suppliers — which is why tonnage belongs in the enquiry rather than in the negotiation afterwards. Ask both sellers for the same tonnage, in the same packing, or the arithmetic is not about them at all.

有效期 · Validity is part of the price

A validity is not administrative housekeeping. It is a statement about how long the seller will hold the volatile components at his own risk. A short, dated validity usually means the freight is booked or firmly indicated and the number is tight. A long validity across a moving freight market means one of two things: the risk has been priced into the number, which makes the offer legitimately higher, or it has not been priced, which makes the offer unlikely to survive to acceptance. A buyer who chases the longest validity and the lowest number at the same time is asking for the version that does not survive.

Begin with the grade name, because that is where the arithmetic goes wrong first. A Chinese grade such as 70# is a nominal penetration with an acceptance band either side of it, so 70# admits 60–80 dmm. In the ASTM convention the two numbers are the band, so 60/70 admits 60–70 and nothing else. The pricing consequence is specific: a seller answering a 70# enquiry off a 60/70 export certificate has priced a cargo he has verified against exactly one line of the Chinese acceptance table and has left every other line unpriced. That is not the same offer as one built against the table, and the difference will not show up until the destination laboratory reports. The 70# page works the grade through.

质量等级 · The class is a different product, so it is a different price

Every JTG F40 grade is divided into quality classes A级, B级 and C级, and penetration is identical across all three. Wax content separates them at maxima of 2.2 %, 3.0 % and 4.5 %, together with ductility at 10 °C, penetration index and the post-ageing residue requirements. Because the wax result is a function of the crude the binder came from rather than of anything done at the loading terminal, an A级-capable cargo and a B级 cargo come from different feedstocks and carry genuinely different costs — and neither seller has to be wrong for the two numbers to be far apart. The quality class page sets out what separates them; the point here is only that 70# on its own does not identify a product well enough to price.

蜡含量 · Why an offer with a wax figure costs more than one without

Wax content is limited by Chinese specifications and is not specified at all by ASTM D946 or EN 12591. It reaches the price twice. First, a measured wax figure is test work somebody ordered and paid for, and it is absent from an ASTM-built certificate because ASTM never asked for it — so an offer quoting a result has a cost inside it that an offer without one does not, and the offer without one is cheaper for exactly that reason. Second, the result decides which market the cargo can be sold into at all: above 2.2 % forecloses A级 however clean the rest of the certificate reads. An offer silent on wax has not been priced against the Chinese acceptance table at all; it has been priced against an export data sheet. The wax content page covers the limits and the crude-source question behind them.

适用标准 · Naming one standard is itself a pricing act

Two documents govern road bitumen in China and they are different kinds of document: JTG F40-2004 is the Ministry of Transport construction specification, and GB/T 15180 is the national product standard for heavy-traffic road asphalt in the AH- series. Which of them a quotation names is not paperwork, because the standard selects the acceptance table and the acceptance table selects the test schedule the seller must commission and pay for. An offer that names both, or names neither, has left that schedule undecided — and an undecided acceptance table gets decided at the destination laboratory, after the leverage has gone. The JTG F40 page holds the requirement tables, including the climate-zone dependency behind the 10 °C ductility line that stops it being a single figure for a grade.

试验规程 · The test protocol is a cost line, and it is the one that goes missing

This is the component most consistently absent from an aggressive number, so it is worth being concrete about what is being left out. Chinese acceptance testing runs to the JTG E20-2011 T-numbers rather than to ASTM designations, and the two are equivalent in intent rather than identical in procedure — which means the lines cannot be transcribed across from an existing certificate, they have to be run. Wax by T 0615, ductility by T 0605 at 15 °C and again at the applicable 10 °C limit, penetration index from penetration at more than one temperature, dynamic viscosity at 60 °C by T 0620 where A级 is in play, and the RTFOT or TFOT residue block by T 0610 or T 0609 are largely absent from a typical ASTM export certificate.

Commissioning that schedule is a modest cost at origin and a per-batch one, so it lands hardest on a small parcel. Not commissioning it is not a saving. It is an unpriced risk sitting with whichever party is holding the cargo when the receiving laboratory reports, and the amount at stake at that moment is not the cost of the tests — it is the cost of the cargo. When one offer is cheaper and the buyer cannot find the difference anywhere else, this is where it usually is. The Certificate of Analysis guide covers what a defensible batch certificate has to show.

The instrument comes first. In this trade the practical range runs from an irrevocable documentary credit payable at sight, through a confirmed credit, through a usance or deferred-payment credit at a stated tenor, to documents against payment or acceptance, to a telegraphic transfer with an advance portion. Each of these allocates risk differently between the two parties and each has a different cost, and both of those facts end up inside the CFR figure whether or not anyone itemises them.

Where the cost actually sits

• Issuance and amendment — bank charges for opening the credit and for every subsequent amendment. Amendments are the avoidable one: they happen when the credit was drafted before the specification and document list were settled.
• Confirmation — where the seller requires a second bank to add its undertaking, the confirming bank prices the issuing bank and the country. This is a risk fee, not an administrative one, and it is the reason two sellers can quote the same cargo differently to the same buyer.
• Tenor — a deferred payment is credit extended by the seller for the length of the tenor plus the transit. Whether the seller discounts the acceptance or carries it, the cost of that money is real and it is inside the price.
• Working capital across the cycle — the seller finances production, packing, inland movement and freight before any document is presented. Transit time to a Chinese port is therefore a financing input as well as a logistics one, which is one reason a longer routing is not simply a freight question.
• Discrepancy risk — a presentation that does not conform costs a fee and, more expensively, time. The goods description must be identical across the sales contract, the credit and the customs declaration; the import documents page sets out where those three drift apart.

How to use this when comparing

Ask both sellers to quote against the same instrument and the same tenor. If a buyer wants a comparison that reflects his own preference, ask for two structures from each seller — sight and deferred — and the difference between them is the financing cost stated openly. That is a more useful negotiation than pressing on the headline figure, because it is the one component where the buyer can genuinely choose to pay less by changing his own behaviour rather than by asking the seller to absorb something.

The credit has to call for the documents the offer promised

One structural point that costs more than it should. The document list in the credit must be the document list in the offer. If the offer includes third-party inspection at load port and a batch Certificate of Analysis against a named standard, the credit must call for exactly those documents, described the way they will actually be issued. A credit that demands a certificate nobody agreed to produce, or that describes the goods differently from the contract, converts a settled commercial deal into a documentary problem at the moment the cargo is already on the water.

两条现金流的时间差 · The offer settles on one clock and the cargo costs money on another

One last point that belongs to the payment structure rather than to the price. The instrument decides when the seller is paid; it decides nothing about when the buyer's other money leaves. Import VAT, destination handling, any detention that accrues and the inland move all fall due on the buyer's side of the port and on their own timetable, which is set by the arrival and the clearance rather than by the credit. A structure that looks favourable because payment is deferred can still put the buyer's total outlay earlier than a sight structure with a faster routing, simply because the cargo arrives sooner and starts costing money sooner. Compare the payment terms of two offers against the shipment window and the transit of each, not against each other in isolation — the financing question and the arrival question are the same question, and only the second one is on the bill of lading.