What happened this week: Last week we were expecting something like a correction phase and it seems that we are now right in it. It is usual after a long bull market. Everyone wants cheaper prices, but not a falling market, and in the dreams of everyone involved the market would be steady, but the prices a fair bit lower. This is hard to achieve, in the days of more competition between commercial reports than on the market itself. Buyers and sellers are now playing the traditional games. Sellers are trying to paint the market better than what it really is and buyers are trying to move things their way by disappearing and hiding away. This is reducing trading volume and activity by quite a bit and leaving the market with insufficient trading volume for a real valuation of prices. This leaves the market with isolated conditions rather than a clear trend. The situation for bull hides in Europe remains reasonably stable due to the short supply chain and hardly any buffer stocks in tanners had to walk away from the market for too long. They tried to play it rough and hard this time, but at the end they couldn’t risk interrupting the supply or letting hides move into the hands of the competition. Despite rising concern about the sustainability of the leather demand in the second half of the year, they still have to procure the production until the summer holidays. So it sometimes took days of hard fights and negotiations to find an agreement and sometimes it was just minutes before the truck had to be loaded before the deal was nailed down. Prices at the end were mostly steady, which doesn’t mean sufficient, with abattoir prices still running well ahead of real market prices, but this is a different problem. What has worked out this month might be a renewed problem next month, because tanners will do everything to squeeze prices down and – as we all know – it needs only one truck unsold to change the market.

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