MARKET COMMENTARY
Last week,natural rubber in the local as well as in the international market was seen taking a breather after the recent up-run. In the Indian market, the commodity slipped towards the close of the week from one and a half month his in the physical market tracking declines in the major overseas market. The ANRPC meeting falling short on taking concrete measures to prop-up natural rubber prices too weighed on the overall market sentiments. In the meantime, as this week’s session commences, sentimetns seems to be muddled in the major overseas natural rubber market. TOCOM rubber futures are seen trading in green while SHFE rubber futures stretched losses. TOCOM rubber futures were up about a per cent on more economic stimulus from China.
MARKET NEWS
Weekly data from SHFE showedrubber inventories in the warehouses monitored by it declining by 5.8 per cent to 127178 tons last week
Natural rubber production in Indian declined 11.8 per cent in April to 45000 tonnes on year on year basis while imports surged by 28 per cent to 37250 tonnes.
The Stock Exchange of Thailand plans to team up with the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE), China’s main futures market, to trade Thai rubber futures in a bid to increase the trading liquidity of Thai farm commodity futures. SET president KesaraManchusree said agricultural commodity futures would be traded on the Thailand Futures Market (TFEX) in the second half of this year after the Agricultural Futures Exchange of Thailand (AFET) finishes merging with TFEX.
Finance Minister ArunJaitly says the Center soon to raise the import duty on natural rubber to 25 per cent from the present 20 per cent.
Kerala State Finance Minister has urge the Central government to either completely ban rubber imports or to raise the import duty to 25 per cent to help the local rubber farmers. Also, the minister has sought more funds for price stabilization fund.
Reuters reports that Asia’s biggest rubber producers, including world No.1 Sri Trang Agro-Industry Plc are set to hike prices sharply, ditching a system of pegging process near benchmark set by Singapore SICOM Exchange.
Thai government has kicked off a soft-loan programme to help rubber companies but more domestic raw materials to help to absorb oversupply and boost the price of the commodity.
