By Cheranka Mendis
Rubber industry remains stagnated despite the few rays of sun that fell last week with low volumes and high prices at the tail end while the tea industry is experiencing stable prices for sales.
Assistant Manager-Rubber at John Keells Limited Shehan Meegama, said that the continuous bad weather that prevails had reduced the volumes drastically than expected with the prices soaring up. "Last week's auction featured Crepe number one 'X' rubber, the best grade in the category for Rs. 490 per kilo while RSS 1 rubber was auctioned at Rs. 400," Meegama said.
Meanwhile the Latex rubber quantity at the auction was a mere 30 metric tonnes and all grade RSS rubber volume was only 12 metric tonnes. "If the weather patterns changed, and we did experience good weather we could have expected 150 to 200 tonnes from each rubber category."
"If there is an improvement in the weather in July- August we expect higher volumes and the prices to climb down. If so we would be able to achieve at least 300 tonnes of rubber. During the next two the three months we expect the market lower than the price level if the quantities increase.
On tea, at the weekly auction which concluded yesterday, approximately 7.9 million kilos of tea were on offer while the low grown teas held to the larger share of stock. Director of Forbes and Walker tea brokers (Pvt) Ltd., Dilan Polonwita stated that 3.5 million kilos of low frown teas were on offer with only 1.2 million entering under high grown teas.
The low grown's met improved demand compared to the previous week, particularly in respect to the better teas at the auction while a slight drop was witnessed on sales of the high grown teas. The fall in the high grown front was due to the drop in quality.
"Plain teas in the high grown category were priced at Rs. 50 upwards while the Udupusallawa and Uva BOPs went up to Rs. 10 to Rs.15. Nuwara Eliya too experienced the same situation," Polonwita said. In the Western market the plain tea category was priced at Rs. 10 while the other teas were slightly lower.
It was said that for the low growns the most active markets were seen from Iran, Dubai, Syria and Turkey while for the high growns the most active was Russia.
"Overall it was a good market and the low grown types performed better than last week," Polonwita said asserting, "we have seen the bottom end of the market and we hope that it would be firm by the end of the month. Prices are bound to go up with increase in quality.
source - www.dailymirror.lk
No comments:
Post a Comment