January Almond Report

I hope everyone had some good times with family and friends over the past few weeks, are feeling recharged and ready to get back to it! We’ve been discussing for some time that sales for the industry have been lethargic after such an incredible start, but also that we expect things to pick up soon. Several markets are very thin and will need to start buying. We saw a small flurry of activity last week and toward the beginning of this week, but we are expecting a lot more demand to start rolling in in the next week or two. In our opinion, many buyers have been holding off and waiting for the position report to be released (which happened this morning). I don’t know what other traders or buyers were expecting, but this report held no surprises for us.

As usual I’ll give my position report – bullet point summary below:

• Receipts of 131.56M lbs in Dec brings our running total to 2.062B lbs. With the bulk of the crop received, we guess our final to fall between 2.11- and 2.14B lbs. (shouldn’t surprise anyone)
• Shipments of 156M lbs are not a record, but it’s certainly close to one, and a very strong showing for December. These strong numbers were brought to you by the USA and EU (both markets saw records)
• Committed (sold-unshipped) inventory remains a record for 3 of past 5 months at 497.68M lbs
• New Sales were sort of “middle of the road” for December at 104M lbs

In summary, this report shows that the idea of a 2.05B crop is in the rear-view mirror (which could potentially show bearish tones) BUT the steady and strong shipments we continue to hold wipe out those bearish sentiments. We are plugging along right where we should be to move a crop this size. For our growers, we are approximately 60-65% sold for the year and will start to push that number closer to 75% by the time we have finished with bloom. Our expectation is that we will see a very active market in the coming weeks.