As oil mills have raised operation rates to an extremely high level this week (May 16-22), soybean crush at domestic mills totals 2,097,500 tonnes (meal 1,657,025 tonnes and oil 398,525 tonnes), up 185,300 tonnes or 9.69% from 1,912,200 tonnes in the previous week. Meanwhile, operation rates (capacity utilization) are 60.41%, up 5.34% from 55.07% in the previous week. Soybean crush will fall to around 1.98 mln tonnes next week as mills will slightly lower down operation rates due to swollen inventories, but it will pick up again to 2.05 mln tonnes in that following week.
Soybean crush nationwide is estimated at 8.77 mln tonnes in May at current utilization rate, far above 5.7296 mln tonnes in the previous month and also above 7.8181 mln tonnes of the corresponding period last year.
As of this week, soybean crush nationwide totals 53,516,314 tonnes in the soybean crop year of 2019/20 (from October 1st, 2019), down 786,671 tonnes or 1.44% from 54,302,985 tonnes of the same period last year. In calendar year of 2020 (from Jan. 1st, 2020), national soybean crush amounts to 31,532,800 tonnes, up 381,215 tonnes or 1.22% from 31,151,585 tonnes of the corresponding period in 2019.
Fig.: Soybean Weekly Crush in China (2016-2020)
Details for weekly crush by region and by group are shown as follows:
