WITH a live wool auction moved forward to Tuesday next week to accommodate Anzac Day, there are only eight more selling weeks left in the record-breaking season at the Western Wool Centre (WWC).
Tuesday and Thursday wool auctions next week, instead of the usual Wednesday and Thursday, might not make any difference to the market, but falling bale numbers could.
At this stage, bale numbers on offer at the WWC for week 43, next week, are projected to be 8068, down 1005 on this week, which in turn was down 2970 bales on a massive 12,043-bale offering last week, the first WWC sale days after the Easter week recess.
The Australian Wool Exchange (AWEX) four-week forecast has bale numbers for the week 44 offering at the WWC bucking the downward trend and increasing to 8450, before dropping 500 bales to 7950 for week 45 sales.
Following the usual practice of recent years, no sales are scheduled at the WWC for weeks 49 and 51 because insufficient bale numbers are expected to not warrant sales those weeks.
Despite the size of last week’s offering, the market opened generally firm on the Wednesday and grew stronger on Thursday, with the Western Indicator closing up 13 cents for the week at 1884 cents a kilogram clean and leading the benchmark Eastern Market Indicator by 108c/kg.
On the Wednesday sellers of 19.5 and 21 micron fleece wools had difficulty finding buyers, but they joined the rest of the microns range on Thursday with price increases of 17c and 16c respectively.
As the Australian Wool Innovation weekly wool market report pointed out, the WWC, as the last of the national wool auction centres to finish trading last week, recorded the highest closing levels of the three centres from 19 through to 22 micron wools, a relatively rare occurrence.
It has brokers waiting with anticipation to see what impact a significant reduction in supply has on prices this week.
Passed-in rates remained relatively high last week, at almost 10pc on Thursday and almost 8pc on Wednesday, and with only very small quantities of style four or better adult fleece on offer, according to AWEX.
But buyers were prepared to pay for quality, with the top three prices at the WWC on Wednesday all 1930c/kg greasy (2777c/kg clean) or above for 15.5 and 16.5 micron Merino fleece and 16.4 Australia Superfine Merino – all appraised as style five.
A top greasy price of 1900c/kg on Thursday for 15.8 micron style five Merino fleece was equivalent to 3050c/kg clean.
It was a big week last week at the other selling centres too, not just the WWC.
According to AWEX’s weekly market report, a 54,409-bale national offering was a 20pc increase on the week before Easter and the biggest national offering since January last year.
It generated $97.45 million is sales and, with 10 weeks still left in the national selling program after this week, took total wool sales turnover at the three AWEX centres so far this season to almost $2.7 billion.
Even allowing for declining bale numbers towards the end of the season and two weeks of no sales at the WWC, based on earnings from the previous 10 weeks it seems fairly likely the wool sales total this season will easily top $3b.
And, while bale numbers might be tapering off, Westcoast Wool & Livestock auctioneer Danny Ryan is among those who are not concerned at a lack of supply.
“History will repeat itself and volumes will taper off towards the end of the season, but we’ve still got quite a bit of wool coming through,” Mr Ryan said this week.
“I don’t think there’s going to be the drop off (in bale numbers) that some are predicting.
“We’ve got good numbers through April into early May and at least a third of it is very good wool – we’ve (Westcoast Wool & Livestock) got some wool from the station country coming in that has a yield of more than 73 per cent and no mid break.
“(In autumn shorn wool) it looks like the break is now moving out more towards the tip and the way it’s trending, it looks like mid-break will be less of a problem than what it was looking two months ago.
“And with some farmers going to eight-months shearing, there’s a few who have bitten the bullet and decided to go early.
“They’re shearing their ewes now looking to get 55-60 millimetres (in staple length) from eight months growth, rather than wait until July after lambing.
“There’s also been some action on forward markets.
“I’ve seen 21 micron for $19 (a kilogram) clean and 19 micron at more than $20 clean this week.
“So it’s looking quite promising for winding up the season.”
