Recent work by mainland netizens revealed that tanker trucks carrying both industrial oil and edible oil were spotted unloading at a factory of the leading edible oil company Jinlongyu. On the morning of July 10, the stock market opened, and Jinlongyu’s stock price plummeted by more than 8%.
In the morning of July 10, at the opening of the stock market, Jinlongyu’s stock price fell by 8.15% to 25.02 yuan per share, reaching a new historical low. By 10 a.m., the stock price had rebounded to 26.09 yuan per share. At the close of trading in the afternoon, the stock price stood at 26.04 yuan, down by 4.41% from the closing price of 27.24 yuan on the 9th. Throughout the day on the 10th, Jinlongyu’s stock price hit a low of 25 yuan per share.
Earlier, a self-media platform used a location tracking service to find that in the incident involving the mixed loading of oil tankers, one of the vehicles in question had traveled between Jinlongyu’s factories in Wuhan, Hubei, and Xianyang, Shaanxi.
The incident of mixed loading of oil tankers refers to a report by the Xinjing News on the 2nd of this month, showing that many tankers in China transport both edible liquids like syrup and soybean oil, as well as chemical liquids like coal-derived oil. To save costs, many tankers do not clean the tank bodies during the cargo exchange process, leading to contamination of edible oil by residual chemical liquids. The report revealed that a tanker carrying coal-derived oil from Ningxia to Qinhuangdao in Hebei was not cleaned before loading with edible soybean oil for further transportation.
Finance Link reported on the 10th that Jinlongyu responded to doubts about the truck’s trajectory by stating that the vehicle was in a new condition during loading at the factory in Wuhan.
On the 9th, the Beijing Business News reported that Jinlongyu stated that all edible oils produced by the company’s factories are packaged in the factory before being transported, with strict monitoring measures in place during transportation.
However, the public did not believe this statement.
“The vehicle in question has been confirmed to have stopped at Jinlongyu’s factory to unload oil, and it still denies it.” “Even for large companies, there are primary refining plants and ordinary tank packaging plants (depending on the size of the plant). Primary refining plants can directly produce packaging, while ordinary tank packaging plants still need to transport oil from the primary refining plant to the packaging plant for processing and packaging. The operating costs of the plants are different. Most of the trucks used for transportation are outsourced carriers, so there might be cases where tanker trucks transport food oil or industrial oil interchangeably, which the carriers or drivers may not care about.”
The market supervision departments of Wuhan and Xianyang responded that they are conducting investigations.
The situation of tanker trucks mixing chemicals and food has been ongoing for a long time. As early as 2005, the Southern Daily reported on the chaos of “tankers difficult to clean, leading to cross-contamination, transporting dangerous chemicals followed by food.”
Extended reading: Tanker “poisoning” in mainland China has long existed, exposed as early as 2005.