Dear Readers,
During the last couple of months it has become evident that the world demand and supply for raisins is in favour of the buyers.
Whilst prices for Turkey, Iran and India are very attractive for the buyers it will largely depend on the quality we can produce in the forthcoming season.
This quality will largely determine the premium we will be able to charge in the market.
We can only emphasize today is that the year 2017 will most probably remain a buyers’ market.
The positive factor is that California did sell during the first two months of this year/season 10 % more compared with the year before but during the recent month of October the sales were down again. However, overall the sales were 4 percent better than in 2015.. At least this is something to be positive about.
We have said it already at the farmers’ meeting, the other day: we are not too optimistic about glorious high prizing because competition from abroad is getting closer and closer as far as quality is concerned however due to their small sizes we will be in a much better position.
We should not forget that today everybody is using, more or less, the same sort of machinery and if nothing disastrous is happening to the grapes themselves (worldwide) every packer should be able to make a decent product.
In the past we have witnessed, inevitably, the very same development in many, many other products/commodities.
In other words: once the competition is aware of attractive price-levels, they will extend their acreages, will buy the better machinery and will make strong and endless competition.
With price-levels starting at USD 1350.- per metric ton, it does not need much fantasy to be not too positive for the season to come.
Whilst, the above message seems somewhat bleak, conclusion is we remain optimistic that our quality can give us the lead in the world-wide raisin-market for the golden variety.
Please see below a chart for Golden medium showing the price development over the last 10 years.
http://www.theraisincompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Screen-Shot-2016-11-27-at-12.27.57.png
From the above one can see that prices are diminishing. We believe there are two reasons for it: the first is the growing availability of golden raisins in South Africa and secondly the growing potential in other countries to offer golden raisins obviously at much lower prices.
We can only repeat ourselves by saying that top-quality is our only way forward.
In our next report we will show a chart of Thompson mediums!