China’s oil imports from Africa plunge amid shift to suppliers in Gulf, Asia and Russia — report

Africa once accounted for more than a third of Chinese oil imports, but now major African oil suppliers are struggling with declining production and exports to China that has found other markets due to geopolitical considerations, infrastructure issues, and domestic political problems, according to a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

China used to import more than a third of its oil supplies from Africa but by 2022, that figure had dropped to about one-tenth, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), an online data platform.

According to Carnegie’s report entitled ‘How Is China’s Economic Transition Affecting its Relations with Africa?’, between 2019 and 2023, there were dramatic increases in China’s imports of oil from Malaysia (408%), the UAE (254%), Kazakhstan (214%) and Kuwait (41%). By contrast, during the same period, all eight major African oil producers, except Chad, earned much less than they did before the pandemic, according to the report.

Angola has fallen down the list from being China’s No. 2 source of crude oil a decade ago to the eighth place in the ranking today. The sharp declines in China’s oil imports from Angola, but also South Sudan (77%), Sudan (67%) and Nigeria (61%), for example, have been due to a number of factors, observers say, including geopolitical considerations, lack of investment in equipment and new oil fields and domestic political problems.

As China’s oil imports from Africa decline, it is increasingly turning to the more predictable production infrastructure of the Gulf countries and Russia and other Asian countries, according to the report from the Washington-based think tank.