Tomorrow is “turkey-day” in the U.S. but today the story is beef. Prices are up nearly 30 percent and while the cattle cycle is part of the story, there is little doubt that China is a major contributing factor. While beef imports by the rest of the world are little changed over the past 10-years, China’s beef imports are up nearly nine-fold. With a CAGR of 24 percent, it is unclear global beef suppliers can keep up if this demand growth continues. China’s own beef production slogs along with a 1.3 percent growth rate, which is roughly just a quarter of the rate of expanding domestic consumption. With no surplus meat carryover, import dependency is slated to continue. China now takes the equivalent of half of the be...
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...