What happened this week:

Despite the holiday season and more customers leaving for the holidays it was at the end a more interesting week than the previous ones.

The reason was the round of underlying activity in the dairy cow market. Underlying because a lot of interest was quite clearly research to test if there is a chance for bargain hunting in the coming weeks. While Italian tanners were relatively quick in their willingness to accept steady money for cows for delivery after the holidays, Asian buyers were a bit more cautious.

It was quite obvious that they are preparing for purchases in the coming weeks. Initiated certainly also by the relatively limited supply from the USA. So went the week exactly according to our expectations – if only the interest was turned into orders!

The bull market was less active, mainly because most of the programmes have already been concluded and for customers outside Europe. Our male hides are simply too expensive compared to the alternatives. Worrying have been again some delays of shipments from European customers as well as payment delays and requests for payment extensions due to the holidays.

In general one can feel that the gap of success between the few leading companies in Europe which are either larger and industrialised or small and specialised and the rest of the industry is constantly widening.

The kill: The kill stabilised on the slightly improved levels. However, we have to wait if the new animal feed scandal is going to affect the kill. A large number of German farms are temporarily banned and we don’t know yet how the consumer is going to react. Consequently it is impossible to predict the kill in the short term.

What do we expect? Interesting is the fact that our market focus moves again from bulls to cows. We don’t expect significant price changes in the coming week, but lifted pressure on cows and steady prices for bulls.