China's largest orange producer, Asian Citrus, will be hoping for an improvement in prices for its summer season after a disappointing result for its winter crop.
The group told the London Stock Exchange Tuesday morning that its winter crop was just over 161,000 tonnes, down on the 171,500 tonnes it produced in 2011 and broadly in line with the volume forecast in November.
According to reports, Asian Citrus was only able to negotiate a minimal annual increase in the average selling price of its winter crop, news which prompted a sudden fall in its share price back in November to a 52-week low of £26.63, down from £37.25 in October.
Since then, the company's share price has struggled to climb above the £30 mark.
Looking ahead, the company has invested in new summer production over the past year, removing a total of 66,449 winter-cropping trees up to the end of June 2012 and replacing them with the same number of trees harvested in summer.
This season's winter orange crop at the group's plantation in Hepu, a county in the Guangxi region, was approximately 32,840 tonnes, with the tree removals resulting in a 26.9 per cent decrease in yields compared with the previous campaign.
However, Asian Citrus said the winter orange crop at its Xinfeng plantation in Jiangxi province had increased from just over 126,700 tonnes last year to around 128,395 tonnes in 2012, an increase of 1.3 per cent.
"The unstable weather and persistent heavy rainfall in 2012 limited the growth of this year's winter orange crop in the Xinfeng plantation," a spokesperson added.
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