Dear Readers,
Quicker than expected we come with some further news about the raisin-market:
Since Turkey is the first in row (but more or less together with the USA) to come up with the new crop, everybody is looking sharply how the crop/situation is changing resp. moving forward.
From important sources over there we receive the news that the impact of the earlier frost and hailstorms, as time goes on, could have caused more damage than the optimists tried to let us believe in an earlier stage.
Today it seems fact that the crop will really not be bigger than 225/250.000 tons.
Aggressive interest/buying of spot material gave us already the feeling that something was basically wrong.
Where there does not exist something like a significant buffer of spot material in Europe, price-movements can easily accelerate.
Looking at Thompson prices or the like, we can state that those levels vary for current and new crop somewhere between USD 2475.- and 2600.- pmt and only in case California should really have a bumper/bumper crop, prices might one day still turn into a downward trend.
We have said it before, with the substantial shrinkage in raisin-acreage over the last decennium in California such downward trend seems hardly possible and with the news from the biggest supplier of raisins (Turkey) expecting a smaller crop, there is obviously no need to bring prices down.