Market Report 25.10.2024

What happened this week

For us, this week followed on seamlessly from the previous ones. It now somehow gives the impression that we live in a different world to many others. If you follow the various reports and listen to colleagues, it must be much more active and interesting everywhere than what has been happening here in the last few weeks. There aren’t that many ways to explain it. Perhaps we simply don’t have what customers want to buy. One conceivable variant. We may be charging far too high prices. A rather unlikely variant, because if the interest among our colleagues is so good, then they are not offering and selling at special prices. There are not too many other possibilities, except that it may not be as exceptionally good as many people are making it out to be at the moment. It is now widely accepted that the situation in the leather industry in Europe is not exactly inspiring much enthusiasm at the moment. So, market activity must be shifting ever more clearly overseas and that would of course come as no surprise. After all, the steady strengthening of the US dollar in recent weeks has undoubtedly made the calculation a little easier. However, it has not been so much as to be the big change. Of course, we are now in a phase in which leather production is slowly increasing again. Nevertheless, it doesn’t look as if this is a real and significant improvement. If you talk to reliable partners in China, they too can only report that the local leather business is suffering from considerable price pressure and at the same time exports are far from normal levels. However, it is also possible that buyers have simply turned their focus away from European hides and are now focussing more on South and North America. European hides are still not and cannot be offered at such an attractive price and therefore potential overseas buyers will probably concentrate primarily on selective types for special leather production. So it will be interesting to see where the real truths of market activity lie at the moment and it should also be noted that the window for shipments to arrive before the Asian New Year is slowly but surely closing. As most of the ongoing programmes with European customers still available do not need to be renewed at the moment, sales this week have been below what we would consider normal. It remains the case that sporadic, random transactions continue to emerge and that these result in larger volumes. In terms of the prices that could be achieved, the changes are rather marginal and if they were, they were characterised either by the currency or by minor adjustments.