As oil mills have been working at full capacity to satisfy the stockpiling before the Spring Festival, operation rate for soybean crush has picked up further to a higher-than-expected level this week (Jan. 19th-25th). Specifically, national soybean crush totals 1,861,400 tonnes (meal 1,470,506 tonnes and oil 353,666 tonnes), an increment of 172,000 tonnes by 10.18% from 1,689,400 tonnes last week. Meanwhile, operation rate (capacity utilization) has gone up by 4.85 percentage points to 52.51% from 47.66% last week. Oil mills will gradually break up for the Spring Festival entering next week, soybean crush will thus hover around 1.35 Mln tonnes and 50,000 tonnes in the next two weeks amid declining operation rate.
Soybean crush volume will total 7,090,000 tonnes in January at current operation rate, down from 7,600,000 tonnes last month and from 8,280,000 tonnes of the same period of last year. So far, national soybean crush in 2018/2019 (as from Oct. 1st, 2018) totals 29,076,685 tonnes, down 2,243,013 tonnes by 7.16% from 31,319,698 tonnes of the same period last year. In 2019 (as from Jan. 1st, 2019), national soybean crush amounts to 5,925,285 tonnes, down 993,693 tonnes by 14.36% from 6,918,978 tonnes in 2018.
Fig.: Soybean Weekly Crush in China (2015-2019)
Details for weekly crush are shown as follows:
