*Japan was for decades the key crude customer for Middle East producers. It was Saudi Arabia’s top Asian customer every year until 2018 – albeit regularly second behind the US in overall terms before the latter’s shale boom earlier this decade. But China has rapidly extended its lead since soaring past Japan in late 2018. For 2019 Japan was 600,000 b/d behind China; the gap widened to almost 800,000 b/d for the first seven months of 2020 (see chart 1).