As operation rate has continued to pick up with the completion of the Spring Festival, soybean crush this week (Feb. 16th-22nd) totals 1,566,400 tonnes (meal 1,237,456 tonnes and oil 297,616 tonnes), an increment of 1,055,100 tonnes by 206.3% from 511,300 tonnes last week. Meanwhile, operation rate (capacity utilization) has gone up by 29.77 percentage points to 44.19% from 14.42% last week, and it will gradually recover to a normal level with a weekly crush volume of 1.73 Mln tonnes next week and 1.80 Mln tonnes in week 10.
Soybean crush volume is estimated to be 4,730,000 tonnes in February, below 7,12,000 tonnes last month but above 4,250,000 tonnes of the same period of last year, for the last Spring Festival was in the middle of February.
As of this week, soybean crush nationwide totals 32,519,485 tonnes, down 3,501,763 tonnes by 9.72% from 36,021,248 tonnes in the previous week. In 2019 (as from Jan. 1st, 2019), national soybean crush amounts to 9,368,085 tonnes, down 2,252,443 tonnes by 19.38% from 11,620,528 tonnes in 2018.
Fig.: Soybean Weekly Crush in China (2015-2019)
Details for weekly crush are shown as follows:
