US beef counts the cost of port impasse
11/03/2015
Philip Seng, CEO of the Meat Exporters Federation, said: “I see the January slowdown as a wake-up call for the US industry in terms of the fiercely competitive situation we face in key markets.
“Conditions are now improving in the West Coast ports, but the damage caused by that impasse is still not finished, and it is clear that competitors capitalised on our inability to move product in a timely fashion. We need to win back the confidence of the valuable Asian customer base we spent many years building.
“The currencies of several of our major destinations have weakened substantially against the U.S. dollar – not only in Asia, but also in the Western Hemisphere,” he added. “And unfortunately the currencies of our major competitors – Australia, the European Union, Brazil and Canada, to name a few – are also in a weakened state. We saw this building throughout the latter half of 2014, and the price disadvantage is increasingly difficult to overcome.”
January beef exports of 79,899 metric tons were down 18% with value of $503.6million, down 2%.
Share this story:
