Dairy Update 19th of January

Yesterday we saw activity across all products again. The market seems stable as most of the trades we did were roughly at the same levels as the days before. Only butter seems to be losing a few cents per kg, but the decline is at a very slow pace. So far January hasn't been the bearish months it has been in the previous year. That on its own is a bullish signal for many. 

We do have to come back to our update from yesterday. We have been reporting more milk in France, but some of our French partners got back to us with figures showing a less positive picture of the French milk supply. We are trying to see what data is most reliable, but for now, it seems the data we got yesterday indicates that France is still behind on last year's milk collection a bit. It doesn't take away the fact that we see lower prices for French products, caused by more free raw milk, cream and concentrate.

Yesterday we saw that liquids continue to trade slightly lower. We hear cream trades are stable, although we also got some confirmations from different partners that some odd loads are available below € 6000,-. SMC concentrate for next week is hard to find, but we did manage to broker some volumes for February at € 2220 DAP NL and we expect to be able to offer additional volumes for February and March at the same levels. Raw milk prices in France we heard as low as 33ct although we can't get any offers on this price yet.

We also got some time to speak to our export partners yesterday to talk about the market over there. But the telling question we got back from them was "What market?". Without any supply pressure and any demand pressure there isn't a real market to find in SE Asia it seems. Only North Africa and the Middle East seem to be in the market.

We also saw some stock reports coming out in the US, butter stocks seem to have declined far less than expected and cheese stocks continue to grow. The US milk output numbers haven't been overwhelming, so some could draw the conclusion that the sales of commodities in the US is starting to slow down a bit as well.