Bulletin

The shoe upper side of the finished leather industry has suddenly come to life after several months during which orders had dried to a trickle.

The hide industry within Argentina continues to struggle; tanneries are reported to only be working to a maximum of 50% of their capacity, with some allocating half of this reduced capacity to gelatin production. 

Until recently, it has been the lower to medium quality hides that have sold well to Chinese tanners, with the higher quality premium hides having struggled to find a home. But, there has been a complete turnaround in the situation. 

After almost a month of static prices, the CICB price indicator for green hides has shown that levels have slightly increased. The price for green hides for week 35 of 2020 now stands at BRL0.49/kg, up from BRL0.48/kg. 

After a long period when the lid was kept on green prices, they have finally started to increase. This was always likely to be the case as suppliers managed to edge their selling prices up over the summer months, although it must be added that a lot of the increased returns have now been eroded by the exchange rates between the local currency and the US$. 

The Chinese tanners remain consistent buyers in the French market, for cow hides. However due to the increase in strength of the Euro, extra US$ are now needed to keep the same Euro net return. Resistance is reported to being felt towards this and new business is more difficult to achieve. 

The last released sales data, showed that there had been a drop off in the volumes sold. But, this must be put into context, as the two weeks prior had shown some of the largest volumes of sales made in 2020, for both cured and wet-blue material. 

Traders within Kenya are now awaiting the opening of Italian tanners to see if they return hungry and start to buy hides. Traditionally, September has been a time when a lot of sales are made from East African countries. 

The pattern, as with suppliers from other origins, is repeating itself in Germany, where the latest reports for exports of hides show that prices and volumes seem to have flatlined. But, as Italian tanners take in the last few orders, both fresh and cured, from German suppliers before they embark on their annual factory closedown, the next few weeks could be interesting. 

The ovine skin market is reported to continue its lacklustre performance through 2020. It will be a year remembered for many reasons, one of which will be the historical low prices for lambskins.