HANOI, June 21 — Coffee trading was slow in Vietnam with domestic prices staying unchanged after hitting a 25-month low a week earlier, while traders in Indonesia were mostly inactive after a long public holiday.
In the Central Highlands, Vietnam’s largest coffee growing region, beans were offered at 35,500 dong (RM6.21) per kilogram, flat from last week, traders said.
“Supplies are tight because farmers are not selling at this low price,” a Ho Chi Minh City-based trader said, noting that farmers are still holding around 10 percent of the output of the 2017-18 crop year.
“Farmers said they’d hold the beans for longer instead of selling at current prices, which is equivalent to production cost for some of them,” the trader said.
In Indonesia, supplies were limited on Thursday, the first working day after the Eid Al-Fitr holiday, because “market is still very quiet as many traders are not yet active,” an exporter in Bandar Lampung said.
Meanwhile, the harvest continued in the southern part of Sumatra island.
Premiums for Indonesia’s grade 4 defect 80 robusta widened to US$70 (RM281) a tonne to London’s September contract, compared with a US$50 premium to the July contract two weeks ago, the exporter said.
Vietnamese state-run media reported on Wednesday that the weather in the Central Highlands remains favourable, with rains allowing local coffee growers to continue replacing old and unproductive coffee trees.
Farmers in the area plan to replant more than 18,000 hectares of coffee trees this year, using new varieties that produce beans of better quality and higher yield, the Vietnam Communist Party’s news website said.
Vietnam exported 81,974 metric tonnes of coffee in the first half of June, compared with 82,469 tonnes in the second half of May, according to the government’s official customs data.
Coffee exports in the year to June 15 totalled 959,505 tonnes, valued at $1.85 billion, the General Customs Department said. — Reuters
