Through the Christmas business, pork sales were given fresh impetus. High-quality parts above all were what the consumers asked for. The material planning for existing slaughter capacities had already been completed before Christmas. Since the Christmas holidays took place in effect in the usual work week, many EU member countries fixed their quotes before Christmas as far as until the beginning of 2009. Largely, the already known pigs-mature-for-slaughter prices remain in an unchanged level.

France alone had its national producers face a considerable decrease in quotation (minus 4 cents) by midday on 24 December, thus tying in with last week’s parameters from the environment. Resulting from changes in currency exchange rates, the corrected quotations turn out to be slightly lower in Sweden and Great Britain.

Trend: With the backlog supply produced due to the Christmas holidays, the market still is well supplied at the beginning of the new year. Since the meat processing industry likes to fill their storehouses with meat being more favourable in price in January, the market will gain new momentum from demand. This way, the recent weakness may soon be overridden.

Explanation
¹corrected quotation: The official Quotations of the different countries are corrected, so that each quotation has the same base (conditions).
base: 56 per cent lean-meat-percentage; farm-gate-price; 79 per cent killing-out-percentage, without value-added-tax (VAT)