Insight Focus
- Thailand’s cane harvest is ending more quickly than we had expected.
- Some mills will close next week as they have run out of cane to crush.
- We think Thailand will crush just 96m tonnes cane this season.
Thailand’s 2022/23 Cane Crush
So far this season, Thai mills have crushed almost 82m tonnes of cane and produced 9.4m tonnes of sugar.
This is about 2% more sugar output than where we were last year, when the industry had crushed 92m tonnes of cane.
This season, we expect the industry to crush 96m tonnes of cane overall. This is below most mill and trade forecasts of more than 100m tonnes of cane. However, we expect the rest of the industry to align with our forecast soon, especially given the recent drop in the rate of cane crushing which has come slightly earlier than even we anticipated.
Thailand has about 15% of the cane to crush for this season and we expect the crush to finish in early April, which is a lot earlier than last year.
Mills Closing
To date, 1 mill has officially closed but 8 mills will close next week (out of 57). This is very early in comparison to previous years and as more mills shut the steeper we will see the decline on the crush pace.
In addition, a number of mills are reporting that the number of cane trucks in the queue waiting to deliver has dropped significantly in the last week.
Mills announce their closing date in advance so that any farmers still to deliver cane have good notice to deliver in time.
Mills Buybacks?
Despite the cane crop looking like it will come in lower than a lot of the industry had expected, we do not think that it is low enough to cause concerns for mills needing to buy-back export sales.
However, less cane will reduce the volume of raws available for mills to re-melt, which will be a blow as current refining margins are very positive for Thai mills both for the domestic and export market.
