What happened this week: The market acitivitiy is quite irregular. Days of high activity are followed by days of low activity and we fail to draw any concrete picture from the situation. The one and only thing what can be said is, that the male market remains reasonably undersupplied and delivery schedules are extremly tight. A lot of very special efforts for regular clients have to be made to secure that drums are not empty one day or another. This has very little to do with the demand. We do not see anything extra so far, but we are still suffering from the decline of the kill reverting back to February. This shortfall has not yet been equalized and it seems, that this will still accompany us for a while. With the Easter holidays ahead of us the supply side will remain below the present needs and only after we have a chance for a normalization. Heavy dairy cows sold reasonably well to the European upholstery tanners who cover quite actively their needs for April and already May. With cow supply being still adequate it is reasonably easy to cover this part of the demand at present. We were missing once again the regualr demand from the Orient for cows destined for the garment

industry. Apart from very optimistic expectations, there is still nothing positive from this part of the business. May be, that the increasing demand for sheep and lambs out of Turkey is a reliable indicator for the improvement expected. It is indeed quite difficult to understand, that despite all fashion trends as well as good business in skins activity is not yet spilling over into the bovine sector. Even more considering, that dairy cows are still trading in the lower end of the historical price range. Side leather tanners in Southern Europe became a bit more lively and finally some more business for lower quality hides arrived. Nothing special, but at least some positive sign for an eventual improvement in shoe orders in Europe or at least for European tanneries. The biggest problem still seem to be the unsufficient price levels obtainable for leather and only the ones with a higher percentage of export business outside the € zone seem to be able to profit in part from better sales and revenues and being able to achieve acceptable results. The GDS shoe fair in Düsseldorf did not deliever too many encouraging results, at least not for the general European situation. Due to the poor

retail conditions in particular in Germany, the general mood was dpressed. It seems for an outsider, that it might be more a structural problem with productions and businesses concentrating, moving abroad and so changing the classical customer/supplier relations rather than a significant decline in the entire volume of  business. We should however, notice the complaints about slower payments in the European shoe industry, what is the logical consequence of the poor business of 2002 so far.The kill: Still no change. Total numbers are steady and normal for the season. Just not what we need. If we could change lights cows to heavy bulls everything would be in perfect order... The next weeks will now be finally slow due to the Easter holidays What do we expect?  There is still no reason for the short term, that anyhting should change. The market will stay on the firm side, but we don’t expect presently any major further price rises anymore. Bulls will not see any relief for the weeks to come while cows and ox/h will need further support fuelled by constant buying to extend or only maintain their levels. This is easily done if Asian buying finally arrives and almost impossible with only the presently active European purchasing base.