The shortage of Litro gas in the market will be completely resolved by Tuesday, the company’s chairman Channa Gunawardena has said, as the second of two cargoes is due to dock.
Asked by Hiru News about the continuing shortage, Gunawardena said it was caused by gas distribution not being carried out for two days, Hiru reported at 7.47 p.m. on Saturday.
A vessel carrying 3,900 metric tonnes of gas arrived in the country on Friday the 16th. On that day 100,000 domestic 12.5 kg cylinders were released to the market, and another 100,000 went out on Saturday. A further 85,000 are scheduled for Sunday, and a second vessel carrying another 3,900 MT is due to arrive on Sunday. (The chairman revised this schedule on Sunday morning — Sunday’s release was cut to 80,000 and a fourth day added. See the update below.)
Three days of releases use up almost exactly one cargo
The two figures the chairman gave can be set against each other, and the result is the story the filing does not tell.
The three announced release days total 285,000 cylinders of 12.5 kg, which is 3,562.5 MT of gas — just over 91 per cent of a single 3,900 MT shipment. In other words, at the rate Litro is currently clearing the backlog, one cargo covers roughly three days of domestic cylinder distribution, before any commercial or smaller-cylinder demand is counted.
That is what makes a two-day interruption enough to empty the market. It also means the promise of resolution by Tuesday rests on the Sunday vessel arriving on schedule: the shipment that arrived on Friday is substantially committed by the end of the weekend.
Laugfs relief lands the same day
Laugfs Gas chairman Nalinda Kurukulasuriya said two gas vessels are due this month, on the 20th and the 24th. A cargo of 3,800 MT is to arrive at Hambantota Port and another of 3,500 MT at Colombo Port.
The 20th is Tuesday — the same day Litro says its own shortage will end. Both suppliers’ relief therefore converges on one date, which is reassuring for supply and unhelpful for redundancy: if either vessel is delayed, there is no staggered cover behind it.
This is a volume problem, not a price one
Litro held its prices unchanged for October, leaving the 12.5 kg cylinder at Rs. 4,365 — the first full month at September’s reduced price card. Nothing in Saturday’s filing concerns price. The constraint being described is physical availability at distribution points.
Two things the filing does not reconcile
First, the dates do not sit together. The chairman attributes the shortage to two days without distribution, while also stating that 100,000 cylinders were released on Friday and 100,000 on Saturday. The two-day halt must therefore have fallen before Friday’s shipment arrived. Hiru does not date the interruption, and this desk is not assuming which days it covered.
Second, no cause is given for the halt itself. Hiru does not say whether distribution stopped because stocks ran out, because a vessel was late, or for an operational reason at the company’s end. A chairman attributing a market shortage to his own company’s distribution pausing, without explaining why it paused, is the central unanswered question here.
One inference that should not be drawn: Sri Lanka suffered an islandwide power outage on Saturday the 17th, but the chairman’s two-day window closes before Friday’s cargo arrived, and no filing connects the grid failure to the gas distribution halt. This desk records the two as unconnected on the evidence available.
Update, 18 October: the schedule moves, and a fourth release day appears
Litro’s chairman gave a revised schedule on Sunday morning, and it is not the one he gave on Saturday night. Channa Gunawardena said 80,000 cylinders would be distributed on Sunday and a further 100,000 on Monday, NewsFirst reported at 8.12 a.m., describing these as special distribution operations prompted by the shortage of the past few days.
Two changes follow from that, and neither is flagged in either filing.
Sunday’s release was cut. Hiru had the chairman scheduling 85,000 cylinders for Sunday; by Sunday morning the figure was 80,000. A 5,000-cylinder reduction is small — under 6 per cent of the day — but it moves in the wrong direction for a company promising the shortage will end on Tuesday.
A fourth day was added. Hiru’s schedule stopped at Sunday. The Monday release of 100,000 is new, and it means the clearance operation now runs through the day before the Tuesday on which Gunawardena said the shortage would be “completely resolved” — not up to the weekend, as the original account implied.
The arithmetic over four days
The denominator check in this article can now be run on the revised schedule. Four announced release days — 100,000 Friday, 100,000 Saturday, 80,000 Sunday, 100,000 Monday — total 380,000 cylinders, or 4,750 MT at 12.5 kg each.
That is more than one full shipment: 4,750 MT against a 3,900 MT cargo is 1.22 cargoes consumed in four days. It works out at about 1,188 MT a day, which puts one cargo at roughly 3.3 days of domestic cylinder distribution — close to the three-day figure this article derived from Hiru’s numbers, and confirmation that the ratio holds rather than being an artefact of the first three days.
The practical consequence is unchanged and now firmer: the operation announced through Monday cannot be covered by the Friday cargo alone and depends on the second vessel.
The second vessel is still prospective
NewsFirst confirms the Friday cargo — 3,900 MT, arrived 16 October — matching Hiru exactly. On the second vessel it says a cargo of 3,900 MT is scheduled to arrive today, Sunday. That is the same ship Hiru had due on Sunday, so the schedule has not slipped. But at 8.12 a.m. it had not yet docked, and no filing since confirms that it did. The Tuesday promise still rests on an arrival that has not been reported as completed.
The claim gets bigger
The chairman’s own framing escalated overnight. On Saturday he said the shortage would be resolved by Tuesday. On Sunday he said that, given these stocks, “there would be no gas shortage in the future.”
That is a materially stronger claim than the one this article was built on, and it is worth marking as such. A company that has just run out of gas, and whose four-day clearance plan consumes more than one shipment, is forecasting permanent sufficiency on the strength of two cargoes. Neither filing gives Litro’s stock position, its monthly import schedule beyond these two vessels, or any basis for the forecast.
Second update, 18 October midday: a third version of the same three days
By Sunday midday the company had given a third account of the same release schedule, and it is 70,000 cylinders larger than the first.
Litro announced that 350,000 cylinders had been released to the market on the 16th, on Saturday the 17th and on Sunday the 18th, Hiru reported at 11.10 a.m. The same filing said a further vessel carrying 3,900 MT was due to reach the country that day, and that the company would move to discharge the cargo quickly once it arrived.
Set the three accounts of those same three days side by side:
| Account | 16 Oct | 17 Oct | 18 Oct | Three-day total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hiru, Sat 7.47 p.m. | 100,000 | 100,000 | 85,000 (planned) | 285,000 |
| NewsFirst, Sun 8.12 a.m. | 100,000 | 100,000 | 80,000 | 280,000 |
| Hiru, Sun 11.10 a.m. | — | — | — | 350,000 |
The third figure is 65,000 to 70,000 cylinders higher than the two that preceded it — a 23 to 25 per cent increase on a total the chairman himself had given less than three hours earlier. Litro does not break the 350,000 down by day, so it cannot be reconciled against the earlier figures line by line, and neither filing acknowledges that the number changed.
Each revision makes the supply position tighter, not looser
The denominator check in this article has now been run three times, and it moves consistently in one direction.
At 350,000 cylinders of 12.5 kg, three days of distribution is 4,375 MT — 1.12 times a single 3,900 MT cargo, at about 1,458 MT a day. That puts one shipment at roughly 2.7 days of domestic cylinder distribution, against the 3.0 days derived from Saturday’s figures and the 3.3 days derived from Sunday morning’s.
So with every upward revision of the release figures, the number of days a cargo covers falls. The company is reporting that it has pushed more gas out than it first said, which is good news for the queues — and which simultaneously means its stock is being drawn down faster than either earlier account implied. The Tuesday promise depends more heavily on the second vessel now, not less.
The second vessel had still not docked at midday
This is the third filing in roughly fifteen hours to describe the same ship in the future tense. Hiru had it due on Sunday; NewsFirst at 8.12 a.m. said it was scheduled to arrive that day; Hiru at 11.10 a.m. still had it “due to reach the country today,” with discharge described as something the company would do once it arrived.
No filing has yet reported the vessel docking. The chairman’s forecast of resolution by Tuesday, and his broader claim that there would be no shortage in future, both rest on a cargo whose arrival remains unconfirmed at the time of writing.
A note on sourcing
NewsFirst has now filed, and this article is no longer single-source. Two verified newsrooms carry the company’s account across three filings: Hiru’s Saturday-evening statement, NewsFirst’s Sunday-morning one, and Hiru’s Sunday-midday one. These are successive statements rather than three reports of one briefing, which is why their figures differ — but they agree on the Friday cargo’s size and date and on the second vessel’s timing, which cross-validates those particulars.
The limitation is unchanged in kind. Every figure in this article still comes from Litro’s own chairman. No regulator, ministry, dealer association or independent party has been quoted by any outlet, and Ada Derana remains unreachable from this desk. This remains one company’s account of its own supply position, now given twice.
Not reported
Neither filing says which areas are worst affected, how long consumers have been queueing, or how large the shortfall is in cylinder terms. Neither gives a figure for Litro’s current stock, distribution figures for the days before Friday, or any independent check on the company’s timeline. Neither dates the two-day halt or explains why it happened — the central unanswered question from Saturday is untouched a day later.
Nor is there any comment from the Consumer Affairs Authority, the Ministry of Energy, or gas dealers’ associations — the parties who would ordinarily be asked whether a shortage is being managed or merely described. Whether any hoarding or over-pricing has been reported at the retail end is also unaddressed.
On Sunday’s statements specifically: no source confirms the second vessel actually docked, says what happens after Monday’s release, or gives any basis for the chairman’s forecast that there will be no gas shortage in future.
The release figures themselves are now the largest unexplained item. No filing reconciles the three different totals given for 16–18 October — 285,000, then 280,000, then 350,000 — none explains why Sunday’s release was first cut from 85,000 to 80,000 and then absorbed into a three-day figure 70,000 higher than the original, and none of the three filings acknowledges that any figure changed. Litro has not published a day-by-day breakdown for the 350,000, which is the single document that would settle whether the company distributed more than it planned or simply restated the same operation with different arithmetic.
Sources: Hiru News (Sinhala), NewsFirst — Litro to distribute 180,000 LP gas cylinders over two days.
