During the crop, which ran from October 2017 to September 2018, Vietnam shipped more than 29.9 million bags of coffee abroad and earned US$3.48 billion. As prices of coffee beans have plunged to the lowest price in the last 50 years, with each tonne being sold at US$1,943, 3.43% lower than the previous crop, the Southeast Asian country only experienced a slight increase of 8.43 % in export turnover.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, some 1.57 million tonnes of coffee were sold abroad for US$2.98 billion during the January-October period, up 21.3% in volume and 0.9% in value in comparison to the same time last year.
The average coffee price in the ten-month period fell 16.2% to US$1,901 per tonne.
Germany and the US remained the biggest coffee importers of Vietnam, with market shares of 12.5% and 9.6%, respectively. Coffee shipments to Germany rose 14.4% in terms of volume, but decreased 6.6% in value. Meanwhile, coffee exports to the US declined 3.6% in quantity and 20% in value.
The International Coffee Organisation (ICO) said that coffee production during the 2017-2018 crop was estimated to grow 5.7% to 164.81 million bags. Brazil was the largest coffee producer in the period, followed by Vietnam and Indonesia.
Coffee supply was 2.58 million bags higher than demand, pulling coffee price down to 111.51 US cents per pound from 132.43 US cents per pound recorded in the 2016-2017 crop. Currently, coffee volume remains high in the stocks of many importers, ICO said.
Since mid-October, Vietnamese coffee beans have been sold at around VND35,600-36,700 per kilogramme, which has gone up slightly but is still lower than the average prices of previous years.
Vietnam’s coffee scarcity and Indonesia’s export limitation sparked an increase in coffee prices, experts said, but there isn’t a bright prospect for coffee prices in the 2018-2019 crop due to an abundant supply.
