Today, Gull New Zealand announced that it would not be increasing its fuel prices inspite of the four major oil companies going on to increase the costs by 6 cents per liter for petrol and 4 cents per liter for diesel. The price rise was announced on Tuesday.

"Gull monitors its costs against the current market every day, and this price increase is not justified. International prices have fallen significantly in the last few days and Gull's policy is not to knee jerk and extract profit from the customer; we need to see that replacement costs are actually at a sustained higher level, not just peaking and then falling back", said Dave Bodger, General Manager of Gull New Zealand.

Since a week before Christmas, oil prices have managed to rise to the tune of nearly US$10 a barrel, hitting the peak of US$92 a barrel for both petrol and diesel. Since then, however, the costs have slipped by some US$2 a barrel for petrol and US$4 per barrel for diesel.

Also, the NZ dollar has strengthened against the currency of US.

Gull did increase its prices when the last hike was announced, but that too after several days and making completely sure that these hikes were justified. "Today however, we are confident that we do not need to increase petrol by six cents per liter and diesel by four cents per liter as our opposition has done", the company said.