After the high-profile glut of cherries on the Chinese market ahead of the Lunar New Year in 2012, the import trade was facing a different challenge for this year’s festival last week when supplies from Chile came up short.
Having suffered sluggish sales for much of January, Chilean cherries saw their market prices shoot up from 2-3 February as supplies effectively ran out ahead of Chinese New Year (CNY) the following weekend (10 February).
“There was a big shortage of cherries from Tuesday (5 February) onwards,” said Rod Hill, import manager of Golden Wing Mau. “Prices began to increase on Sunday (3 February) as people had increased their demand, and they rose by Yn100 per carton from Tuesday onwards.”
The shortage appears to have resulted from importers overestimating the amount of fruit in storage.
“Everybody thought there was fruit in store because there had not been the volumes sold that we expected. So everyone thought there’d be fruit available,” said Hill.
“In Guangzhou, there just don’t appear to have been the volumes expected. Maybe some people have stored fruit for the post-CNY market because of low prices. Maybe there was more distribution outside of Guangzhou, which is positive. But the shortages last week were totally unexpected.”
Jeremy Chen of importer Origin Direct Asia reported a similar situation in the Shanghai market, where storage levels were also much lower than importers had anticipated.
“Everyone was expecting cherry prices to go down in the week leading up to CNY because buyers and consumers were going away on holiday, but instead they picked up, and the fruit was selling very quickly,” he said. “Supply volumes dropped off from the weekend of the 2-3 February and the last couple of days it was very difficult to find cherries on the market.
“It seems a lot of buyers just didn’t want to take the risk of bringing in fruit `late on`, so the market ended up short.”
Jumbo cherries were fetching around Yn400 per carton in Shanghai last week, according to Chen, up by around Yn100 per carton on the previous week’s price levels.
Hill pointed out that the jump in cherry prices was not driven by a sudden improvement in the quality of the fruit arriving. Indeed, several importers maintain that the overall quality of Chilean cherries failed to inspire demand this year.
“A lot of the fruit that arrived was affected by softness issues due to rain. And even when the fruit was hard, the flavour was lacking,” said one Hong Kong-based importer, who preferred to remain anonymous. “Many buyers finished early with Chilean cherries this year and the last vessel to arrive with big volumes was on 26 January.”
In Shanghai, Chen said that sales movement of other items such as Red Globe grapes and kiwifruit picked up from 5-6 February because there weren’t enough cherries to meet demand. “We’ve moved six container loads of Red Globes in the past few days, mainly from Peru,” he said on Friday (8 February).
In Guangzhou, meanwhile, a key importer told Asiafruit that the performance of Peruvian grapes had fallen short of growers’ high expectations in terms of prices. “Last year, good- quality fruit was fetching around Yn250 per carton whereas this year it’s been averaging roughly Yn220 per carton,” he said.
While China’s import market usually suffers a post-CNY lull amid an overhang of fruit, this year looks to be very different. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens now,” said Hill. “There should be limited volumes available after CNY. The price rise was due to a shortage of fruit rather than unexpected demand.”
