This week: Apart from the seasonal increase in the kill, the market situation is changing little at the moment. However, it also gives the impression that nobody is really interested in the fact that strong price changes from one side or the other would hardly have any positive effects on the leather business as such. So, the regular programmes with the established customers continue to run at more or less unchanged prices, even with unchanged quantities.

This may be sufficient information for today’s suppliers, but the fundamental question must always be asked as to whether the hides that go into production can also be successfully resold as leather in the end. The many question marks that are currently arising geopolitically certainly also play an important role. Who wants to take any additional risks in these unstable times and who can actually plan with any degree of reliability? So it seems that everyone is making up their own picture of the current situation.

The decisive factor here is, of course, that much of the information and bad news that we have been able to glean from the media for some time now ultimately relates to the past. As a supplier of raw materials, however, we have to look to the future and ask ourselves whether the negative developments of the past are also valid for the future, or whether the negative trend may already be coming to an end. However, it is very difficult to detect any real signs of improvement in the coming months.

First of all, the elections in the US will provide an indication of whether consumer sentiment will improve and what impact possible tariffs could have. Of course, the result will also play a decisive role in the global security situation.

Sales this week were again limited to the regular programmes and the weekly random transactions. This means that volumes are not evenly distributed across all skin types in production. Heavy male hides are still finding their regular buyers and for the rest of the product, price alone determines sales opportunities. In many cases, and this obviously also applies to other provenances as has been the case for some time, the official price levels are still very different, which also makes a serious market description very difficult.

The kill: The price increases for live cattle continued unabated last week. Contrary to all the complaints from the meat industry, business appears to be much better than is being claimed. Exports may also be partly responsible for this, but in general the demand for beef appears to be much better than many people often claim. Obviously, and contrary to the hopes of NGOs, beef is not the main victim of public opinion at the moment. The kill slowly increases day by day, step by step, although this week the total number was limited owing to the public holidays. However, with a full number of production days in the week, volumes can no longer increase significantly owing to a lack of capacity. Slaughter weights are already relatively high for the time of year.

What we expect: It is difficult to imagine that the general situation will change much this week. The results of the US presidential election will be available and then we will see how the financial markets and politicians react. It usually takes some time for all this to be analysed, processed and incorporated into decisions. Otherwise, no major imbalance between supply and demand is to be expected in the coming weeks, at least in our region. Almost without speculative influences, prices are not expected to be very dynamic.

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