China continued to build its massive stockpile of crude oil in April, even though imports dropped to the lowest in nearly four years. China's surplus crude amounted to about 430,000 barrels per day in April as the 20% drop in imports was outweighed by refinery processing sliding to the lowest since August 2022. The ongoing building of inventories by the world's biggest crude importer underlines that China is in quite a different situation to the rest of the world, which is burning through oil stockpiles in order to compensate for the loss of about 12 million bpd of supply to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.