Now they seem to have decided they can do better by not competing, especially in places that are politically unattractive to Western buyers, like West Africa and Myanmar. As Western oil companies watched closely, India and China collaborated in December on a successful joint bid for PetroCanada's Syrian oil and natural gas assets. Their largest state-owned oil companies, the Indian company Oil & Natural Gas and China National Petroleum Corp., collaborated on a deal worth $578 million. Last week, they agreed to cooperate where possible in bidding for all third-country oil assets, a move that has the potential to save them hundreds of millions of dollars. "We have agreed to cooperate down the entire hydrocarbon value chain," Mani Shankar Aiyar, India's minister for petroleum and natural gas, said by telephone from New Delhi. "The scope of what we are going to do begins with R&D and ends with petroleum refining." More specifically, he said, the two countries will exchange information in bids for overseas assets. Aiyar last week led a team of government officials and top Indian oil companies to China to sign the agreement. India and China have yet to resolve a longstanding dispute over their common border across the Himalayas, where China won the war they fought in 1962, but diplomatic and trade relations have been blossoming as their economies have expanded. For both countries, the possibility of importing oil from their own fields at a cost of about $10 a barrel after royalties and fees is far more attractive than buying in the open market, where oil prices are again climbing toward $70. "Both have driven up prices in all the bids they have participated in in the last two years," said Sam Dale, an oil industry analyst in Singapore with Energy Intelligence. "Agreeing to cooperate will smooth the process, should competition emerge in bidding for particular assets." He said collaboration was particularly attractive where risks were high. "The thinking is, why not bring a friend along?" India has lost to Chinese companies in bidding for big leases in Nigeria and Ecuador, and more recently in Kazakhstan, and some analysts said they believed that India's bargaining power with the Chinese would be limited. "The world oil market is very competitive and it is not clear what advantages cooperation could bring, particularly to the Chinese side since they are a much larger participant in the market," said Nicholas Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. India got into the bidding after the government deregulated the oil sector in 2002. That helped its state-owned oil companies, mainly Oil & Natural Gas, to make bigger profits, but the country's quest for oil assets coincided with an intensified global scramble for oil. "Wherever the Indians have gone, the Chinese are already there," said Madhu Nainan, chief editor of Petrowatch, a market intelligence newsletter in India. "Mostly, it is India that needs cooperation with China - and not the other way around." Other experts said that national strategic imperatives would dictate how each country approaches a deal, and they said permanent cooperation was improbable. "I expect more competition than cooperation," said Sanjeev Prasad, head of research and energy analyst at Kotak Securities, a brokerage firm in Mumbai. India consumes 2.2 million barrels a day, about a third of China's demand, and imports 70 percent of its daily consumption, versus about 40 percent for China. In two decades, both countries are expected to import as much as 85 percent of their consumption. Dale said he believed that India and China would succeed jointly only in going after assets that were not attractive to Western companies, but Aiyar brushed aside such skepticism and said that the agreement with the Chinese government made future deal-making "more rational, planned and less clandestine." He added that such cooperation could only improve with practice. "It is, after all, for both India and China, the sensible 21st-century thing to do," Dale said. OPEC cuts oil forecast OPEC trimmed its forecast for global oil demand this year by 100,000 barrels a day and left an estimate of the need for its own crude unchanged in the second quarter, Bloomberg News reported from London. Global demand will average 84.8 million barrels a day this year, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said in a monthly report. That amount still is 1.9 percent more than last year. In late trading on Friday in New York, oil for February delivery was up $1.72 a barrel to $68.75 PIN/INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE