Iran would not offer further discounts to draw customers into its oil market, Mohsen Qamsari, director general for international affairs of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) told Reuters by telephone on Tuesday.
He also said, ‘We will be more subtle in our approach and may gradually increase output. We don’t want to start a sort of a price war.
‘I have to say that there is no room to push prices down any further, given the level they are.’
Overproduction, chiefly by Saudi Arabia and non-OPEC producers, has currently led to an excess of up to 2.5 million bpd in the market which has caused crude prices to lose around 60 percent of their value since mid-2014.
OPEC introduced output ceiling of 30 million bpd in its December 2011 meeting as it scrapped allocating fixed production quotas to member countries. The group, however, has been producing nearly a million more barrels than its ceiling for the past 16 months.
