This week (Aug. 10th-16th), an unexpected cut in operation rate has occurred as some mills are still confronted with swelling soybean meal inventories and some have made an emergency shutdown by typhoon Lekima. Thereby, soybean crush totals 1,578,400 tonnes (meal 1,246,936 tonnes and oil 299,896 tonnes), a reduction of 79,200 tonnes by 4.77% from 1,657,600 tonnes last week. Meanwhile, the operation rate (capacity utilization) is 44.18%, down 2.21 percentage points from 46.39% last week. As mills plan to boost their operation rate a little bit, soybean crush is predicted to increase to around 1.62 mln tonnes next week and to around 1.68 mln tonnes the following week. 

As of this week, soybean crush nationwide totals 73,835,315 tonnes in the crushing year of 2018/19 (from October, 2018), down 4,231,475 tonnes by 5.42% from 78,066,790 tonnes of the same period last year. In 2019 (from Jan. 1st, 2019), national soybean crush amounts to 50,683,915 tonnes, down 2,982,155 tonnes by 5.55% from 53,666,070 tonnes of the corresponding period in 2018.

Fig.: Soybean Weekly Crush in China (2015-2019)

Details for weekly crush are shown as follows: