This week (Sept 19-25), with massive soybean arrivals at ports and in order to satisfy the demand ahead of the National Day holidays, some oil mills are operating at full capacity and several mills also resume soybean crush after years of suspension, so operation rates for soybean crush continues climbing, sending the crush to hit a fresh single-week high. Specifically, soybean crush at domestic mills totals 2,273,250 tonnes (meal 1,795,868 tonnes and oil 431,918 tonnes), up 89,600 tonnes or 4.10% from 2,183,650 tonnes last week. Meanwhile, operation rates (capacity utilization) are 65.45%, up 2.58% from 62.87% in the previous week. As the next two weeks will fall on the eight-day National Day holidays, the crush is predicted to be 1.90 mln tonnes and 1.53 mln tonnes, respectively.

Soybean crush nationwide is estimated at 8.911 mln tonnes in September at current utilization rate, basically flat at 8.9128 mln tonnes in the previous month and also far above 7.5597 mln tonnes of the corresponding period last year.

As of this week, soybean crush nationwide totals 90,297,864 tonnes in the soybean crop year of 2019/20 (from Oct 1st, 2019), up 5,600,079 tonnes or 6.61% from 84,697,785 tonnes of the same period last year. In calendar year of 2020 (from Jan. 1st, 2020), national soybean crush amounts to 68,268,350 tonnes, up 6,721,965 tonnes or 10.92% from 61,564,385 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: