Filipino motorists will experience additional financial burden as prices of diesel products will rise by P2.10 per liter, while gasoline prices will escalate by P1.90 per liter effective Tuesday, July 18. Kerosene, which is the other commodity in the triumvirate of weekly price adjustments, will also go up by P1.80 per liter, according to the pricing advisories sent by the oil companies. As of this writing, industry players that already sent notices on their price hikes include Shell Pilipinas Corporation, Seaoil, Cleanfuel, Chevron, PetroGazz, Jetti Petroleum and PTT. Competitor-firms are anticipated to match the price adjustments. Prior to this round of price upticks, cost swings at the domestic pumps since the start of the year already logged net decrease of P2.95 per liter for diesel; and a heftier reduction of P5.50 per liter for kerosene products, based on a monitoring report of the Department of Energy. For gasoline products, the year-to-date price movements had a reverse trend of P5.65 per liter aggregate increase, because there had been more instances when the cost of this commodity had been on upswing. Reports on stretched output cut of Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, had been a key trigger to last week’s rally in global oil prices. International benchmark Brent crude spiraled above $81 per barrel last week, however, as of Monday (July 17) trading, it tumbled anew to a level below $79 per barrel level. As emphasized by industry experts, the decline in prices in this week’s first day of trading was mainly traced to the underwhelming economic growth data reported by China, which just hovered at 6.3-percent, essentially failing to meet an earlier target of 7.3-percent gross domestic product GDP) growth. An added factor to the softening of prices had been the resumption of production from one of Libya’s oil field that had been menaced with kidnapping incident recently.  Libya is oil producer-country that has membership with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Market watchers are still not inclined to give assumption though if such early downtrend in prices could lead to prospective rollback at pump prices next week.