Coffee trade in Vietnam is expected to pick up this week as traders and farmers return from the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, but with current low prices, sales are forecast to remain limited, dealers said on Tuesday.
"Many are still on holiday so trade has been very slow in the past week and with prices so low right now farmers would try to hold back sales to put pressure on prices," a trader at Simexco in Buon Ma Thuot, the capital of top coffee-growing province of Daklak, said. The Lunar New Year holidays ended last Friday but farmers traditionally extend their vacation until the middle of the lunar month before returning to work.
Traders said offers this week were about 25,600 dong-25,700 dong ($1.46-$1.47) per kg of beans, unchanged from prices before the holidays two weeks ago. "Sales could accelerate only if domestic prices reached 30,000 dong per kg," another trader in Buon Ma Thuot said.
Discounts for robusta grade 2, 5 percent black and broken were quoted at $140 a tonne to London's March contract, also unchanged from two weeks ago, pricing the beans for spot shipment at $1,540 per tonne, free-on-board at Saigon Port. Vietnam, the world's second-largest coffee exporter after Brazil, shipped 140,000 tonnes of coffee in January this year, down nearly 19 percent compared with last January and down from a record 244,000 tonnes loaded in January 2007.
Vietnam has ended picking an estimated 1.2 million tonnes, or 20 million 60-kg bags, of coffee from the 2008/2009 crop harvest, from 1 million tonnes in the previous season, traders have said. The country's coffee crop year lasts from October to September, starting with a four-month harvest.
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