Every time Malaysia’s weekly fuel prices are announced, one term always appears in the official explanation: MOPS. In one sentence: MOPS (Mean of Platts Singapore) is the market price average for refined petroleum products — petrol and diesel — traded through the Singapore hub, and it determines roughly 70-80% of what you pay at a Malaysian pump.
Who Exactly Is “Platts”?
Platts is not an oil company and not a government agency. It is a price reporting agency that began as a petroleum news publication founded by Warren C. Platt in 1909, and is today part of S&P Global Commodity Insights.
Every business day, Platts assessors track real bids, offers and trades for petroleum cargoes during a 30-minute Market on Close (MOC) trading window ending at 4:30pm Singapore time, then publish an official assessed price for each product. The “Mean of Platts Singapore” is simply the arithmetic mean of these daily assessments over a period — in the case of Malaysia’s pricing formula, one week.
Why Singapore?
Just as Europe prices off Rotterdam and America off the US Gulf Coast, Asia prices off Singapore. That is no accident:
- Around 1.5 million barrels a day of refining capacity on Jurong and Bukom islands.
- The world’s largest bunkering port, supplying tens of millions of tonnes of marine fuel a year.
- Massive storage terminals and hundreds of traders, banks and oil companies dealing daily — creating the most liquid spot market in the region.
In fact, Platts’ FOB Straits assessment even includes the Malaysian terminals at Pasir Gudang (since 2001) and Pengerang, Johor (since 2015) as delivery points. Some of that “Singapore-priced” petrol actually loads from Malaysian soil.
MOGAS 95, MOGAS 97 and Gasoil: Which Product Prices Which Fuel?
MOPS is not a single price — it is a family of benchmarks, and each fuel at a Malaysian station references a different product:
- MOPS MOGAS 95 Unleaded — sets the product cost for RON 95 petrol (its market price, before the BUDI 95 subsidy).
- MOPS MOGAS 97 Unleaded — the benchmark for RON 97, currently RM 4.40/litre.
- MOPS Gasoil 10ppm — the benchmark for Euro 5 diesel, currently RM 4.62/litre at the market rate.
All these benchmarks are quoted in USD per barrel. To become sen per litre in Malaysia, they must be converted into ringgit — meaning the USD/MYR exchange rate also quietly moves your pump price, even when MOPS itself stands still.
How MOPS Enters the APM Formula
In the Automatic Pricing Mechanism (APM) formula, MOPS is the first and largest component: the product cost, roughly 70-80% of the final price. Only on top of that are the oil company margin (alpha), transport costs, station retailer margin, and taxes or subsidies added.
Since those other components stay fairly fixed week to week, almost all of your weekly price movement comes from MOPS moving (plus a little from the exchange rate). When you ask “why did it go up 10 sen this week?”, the honest answer is nearly always: last week’s MOPS went up.
MOPS vs Brent: When Pump Prices Rise Even as Crude Falls
Many consumers watch Brent crude and get confused when pump prices move the other way. The reason is simple: Brent is the raw material, MOPS is the finished product. The gap between the refined product price and the crude price is called the crack spread — the refining margin.
The crack spread can widen even while crude falls: regional refineries shut for maintenance, petrol demand spikes in travel season, or supply of a specific product is disrupted. In those conditions MOGAS 95 and gasoil become expensive relative to Brent — and Malaysian pump prices rise even as headlines say “crude oil is down”. The other forces moving prices are unpacked in Why Do Fuel Prices Rise?.
One more technical note: Asian refiners actually reference Dubai crude (the medium sour grade they process) more than Brent. So Brent is only a rough proxy for our region’s raw material cost.
The One-Week Lag: The Friday–Thursday Averaging Window
The government does not use daily MOPS directly. Instead, MOPS is averaged over a one-week window (Friday through Thursday), and that average is fed into APM to set the following week’s price.
Two effects follow: first, pump prices always lag the Singapore market by about a week — a MOPS spike today only reaches your station next week. Second, the weekly average smooths out daily swings, so one wild day in the market does not necessarily change the pump price. For where the market may head this year, see our 2026 global oil price outlook.
Brent tells you the world’s raw material price. MOPS tells you the real price of petrol in our region — and it is MOPS that goes into Malaysia’s pricing formula.