Brazil to present hide export volumes in a new way
20/05/2016
Reporting its figures for April, CICB gave a total volume in weight of the finished leather, crust and wet blue Brazil’s tanners exported in the first four months of this year. In all, this figure reached 160.7 million kilos.
In past reports of this kind, CICB also offered the number of hides shipped from Brazil, finished and semi-finished. It is this aspect of its reporting that has changed. CICB has told World Leather that tanners have been asked by Brazilian customs authorities to submit a figure in square-metres for all their hide exports.
Industry commentator David Peters has told World Leather that this is perfectly in keeping with the way tanners and their customers do business already. He said that a change that took place in the US in the 1980s, selling hides and wet blue per piece, had brought about a long-established practice in the global leather industry of “sales by area”.
“Sales by area is traditionally the preferred unit of measure adopted by tanneries,” he explained. “All Brazilian wet blue is sold by the square-foot and I have not heard of any sales on a per hide basis. In the case of crust, this is always sold per square-foot. Therefore moving to a standard of square-metres [which customs authorities in most countries, including Brazil, prefer to the leather industry’s insistence on calculating by square-feet] is not a stretch. It’s something that makes sense.”
It also makes sense because hides are far from being uniform in size and what matters in the end is yield.
In the first four months of this year, Brazilian tanners exported wet blue, wet blue split, crust and finished leather with a total area of 67.3 million square-metres. This represents an increase of 8.7% compared to the figure for the first four months of 2015.
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