This week (Oct 20th-26th), oil mills are highly motivated by healthy crush margins, so operation rate continues to rise, creating the highest weekly crush volume. Soybean crush volume in domestic refineries totals 2,015,400 tonnes (soybean meal 1,592,166 tonnes and soybean oil 382,926 tonnes), up 46,900 tonnes by 2.38% from 1,968,500 last week. The operation rate (capability utilization) is 57.54% this week, up by 1.34% from 56.20% last week. Due to the downtime for maintenance or lack of soybean in some mills toward the end of the month, the crush volume will decline slightly to around 1.87 Mln tonnes next week (Week 44), but will rise back to 2.0 Mln tonnes in Week 45. 

      Calculated by current operation rate, national soybean crush volume in October is forecast to hit 8.30 Mln tonnes, higher than last month’s 7.97 Mln tonnes and far higher than last year’s 7.56 Mln tonnes of the corresponding period. 

      Till now, domestic soybean crush volume in 2018/2019 (dating from Oct 1st, 2018) totals 6,975,285 tonnes, up 614,728 tonnes by 9.6% from 6,360,557 tonnes of the same period last year. In 2018 (dating from Jan 1st, 2018), domestic soybean crush volume amounts to 72,414,150 tonnes, up 39,921 tonnes by 0.55% from 72,374,229 tonnes during the same period in 2017.

      Fig.: Soybean Weekly Crush in China  (2014-2018)

      Details for weekly crush are shown as follows: