Report: Corn market trends

25-03-2010 | Home | News

Himfr.com, one of China’s leading B2B search platforms with more than 30 B2B industry websites to its name, reports on corn market trends.

Pig feed sales down, no peak in corn consumption

Recently, China’s feed and aquaculture industries have been recovering slowly. Sales of pig feed are still significantly down, and corn consumption is weak, so feed enterprise slowed their pace of purchase. However, Chinese corn prices have risen and cost levels have increased. At the same time, soybean prices have experienced recent stability and the cottonseed meal market has been stable and declined. In addition, China’s corn imports and exports have also declined, but have experienced significant growth year-on-year. The current Chinese corn prices are stable in most areas, and in some areas have slipped.

Since the beginning of March, pig feed sales volume has declined about 20% -30%, and in some areas has decreased by 40%. Although in March sales of poultry are expected to show growth in some areas, and in some area increase by 15%; but the overall sales have not improved, and corn consumer demand growth is still quite slow.

According Himfr’s data, in February of this year, Chinese corn imports amounted to 105,461 tons, compared with exports of 142,592 tons the previous January, a decline of 26%; but compared with import volume last year of 40 tons, it is a dramatic increase year-on-year. China’s corn exports in February amounted to 2,537 tons, reduced by 59%, relative to last year’s export volume of 12,325 tons, which was a year-on-year increase of 20%. Although the recent volume of China’s imported corn has decreased compared with last month, it still remained above 100,000 tons, which indicates an increase in the Chinese market supply.

Pig feed

Himfr analyzes that the current sales volume of China’s pig feed is still substantially reduced, and corn consumer demand has not increased. Despite the recent corn prices in some regions going up in varying degrees, the level of deep processing costs increased from the previous month. Consumer demand is not obvious, which means in some areas corn prices have come down. It is expected that the sales of Chinese feed will be gradually restored, and in the corn market, short-term prices have adjusted but later the price of corn will soar.