-Atrocious Export Sales week all around – marketing year lows corn/wheat/SBM
-All sales at bottom/below expectations
-Corn/wheat/soybean sales minimal
U.S. corn sales, for the week ended 01/02/20, were abysmal at a marketing year low 162k tonnes (6.4 million bushels) and compared to last year’s same-week sales of 18.1 million bushels. While it was a holiday week, sales all around were still clearly disappointing. The largest reported-destination sales were just 21k tonnes to Japan, with 131k tonnes being unknown, while Mexico saw net cancellations of 42k tonnes. Total commitments of 729 million bushels remain down 43% from last year’s 1.271 billion, leaving sales needing to average roughly 31.0 million bushels/week in order to reach the USDA’s 1.850 billion bushel export projection vs last year’s 20.4 million/week average from this point forward. Outside of the potential optimism for sales to China to develop, we feel USDA is fully warranted in lowering their export projection in today’s WASDE report.
U.S. soybean sales last week of 356k tonnes (13.1 million bushels) were below market expectations of 400-800k tonnes, but would have been even worse if not for the USDA’s lowering of last week’s sales to just 9.3 million bushels from the initially-reported 12.1 million. Last year saw 22.4 million bushels in net cancellations this week. Total commitments of 1.094 billion bushels are down 2% from last year’s 1.116 billion bushels, leaving sales needing to average roughly 20.5 million bushels/week in order to reach the USDA’s 1.775 billion bushel export projection vs last year’s 19.9 million/week average from this point forward. This week’s activity reflected new sales to China of only 8.7k tonnes, with the largest sales being just 76k tonnes to Germany, while 176k tonnes in sales were reported as unknown. While the USDA may hold their export estimate unchanged today on hopes of larger Chinese purchases down the road, it is highly concerning total commitments by all other destinations combined of 18.6 MMT are down 10.3 MMT from last year at this time.
U.S. wheat sales were exceptionally weak at just 81k tonnes (3.0 million bushels), easily a marketing year low, below market expectations of 200-550k tonnes and even below last year’s same-week sales of just 4.8 mil bu. Hopefully wheat sales will pick up again post-holidays as a fairly decent stretch of sales were seen in Nov-Dec. Total commitments of 696 million bushels are still up 6% from last year’s 658 million, while USDA is projecting a 4.2% increase in exports on the year. We estimate wheat sales will need to average roughly 12.3 million bushels/week in order to reach the USDA’s 975 million bushel export estimate vs last year’s 13.9 million/week from this point forward.
Soybean meal sales of 74k tonnes were below market expectations of 75-250k tonnes and were a marketing year low, while soybean oil sales were minimal at just 2.6k tonnes vs market expectations of 0-25k. SBM total commitments are down 19% from last year (USDA estimating 2.6% decline on the year), while soybean oil commitments are still up 6% from last year vs USDA estimating a 12.4% decline from last year.
