Sri Lanka’s November fuel price increases have not brought pump prices up to cost-recovery levels, and both auto diesel and Petrol 92 are still being sold below what the pricing formula requires, Verité Research said.
The two fuels moved in opposite directions, the Daily Mirror reported.
- Auto diesel — the gap between the market price and the cost-recovery price narrowed to Rs 62 per litre, because the pump price rose while the formula-based price slipped slightly.
- Petrol 92 — the shortfall widened to Rs 57 per litre, because the formula price climbed faster than the pump price.
A price increase therefore closed the gap on one fuel and opened it further on the other. The two figures are not comparable as a single trend and should not be added together.
The subsidy is still inside the formula
Verité Research also noted that the diesel pricing formula continues to include the Rs 70 per litre subsidy introduced in October.
That matters for reading the diesel figure. The Rs 62 shortfall is measured against a cost-recovery price that already has the subsidy built into it, so it is not the full distance between the pump price and the unsubsidised cost of supply.
The same subsidy is what the government went to Parliament for last week. This desk reported the Rs 47 billion supplementary estimate sought to fund the diesel subsidy on 4 November.
The research organisation said the underlying figures are published through the Fuel Price Tracker maintained by PublicFinance.lk.
Not reported
The filing does not give the pump prices or the formula prices themselves — only the gaps between them — and does not state the size of the October gaps, so the direction of each move is reported without the previous figure behind it. It does not cover petrol 95, kerosene or furnace oil, and carries no response from the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation or the Ministry of Energy.
A note on sourcing: no other verified newsroom had filed on the Verité Research analysis at the time of writing. Searches returned the routine monthly fuel price revision stories, which are a different and frequently recurring item.
