BEIJING (MarketWatch) -- China has issued oil product wholesale licenses to three companies, including two of China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.'s joint ventures, the Ministry of Commerce said on its Web site Friday.

The Sinopec joint ventures were set up with ExxonMobil Corp. and Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco, in a $5 billion investment deal in refining and marketing in the southern Chinese province of Fujian earlier this year.

The joint venture companies are Fujian Refining & Petrochemical Co. Ltd., which plans to triple the capacity of a refinery at Quanzhou to 240,000 barrels a day by early 2009 and Sinopec SenMei (Fujian) Petroleum Co. Ltd, which will manage and operate around 750 filling stations and oil depots.

The third oil product wholesale license went to an oil storage company located in Langfang, a town in North China's Hebei province.

China's oil product wholesale market was restricted to domestic companies until the end of last year, when the government opened the market to foreign investors as part of its commitment to the World Trade Organization.

However, the government stipulated that foreign companies must set up joint ventures with state-owned or private Chinese partners for oil product sales in China.

Analysts believe foreign firms will only successfully tap into China's wholesale oil market through alliances with Sinopec or PetroChina Co. (PTR), because they account for 90% of China's refining capacity.

Failure to secure such joint ventures with PetroChina and Sinopec would leave them exposed to possible shortages of supply, and they would also lack cost-effective access to distribution networks if they wanted to sell products in inland provinces.