The third week of the new year has already come to an end and we still cannot report that the year 2023 has really started. From our point of view, the first three weeks dragged on without any noteworthy activities or insights. Of course, this is largely due to the fact that we have a very early Chinese New Year this year, which means that the holiday break in Europe has merged almost seamlessly into the holiday lull in Asia. In addition, of course, there is the end of the restrictive pandemic policy in China, which came so quickly that the manufacturing industry and the people were not really prepared for it. What consequences this will have for the economy as well as for private consumption in China can only really be seen in the weeks after the Chinese New Year. In such a constellation, everyone actually constructs their own picture of the market as they would like things to develop. On the butchers side, they like to point to the lower number of slaughters and on the other hand to the new situation in China, which in simple combination means less supply and more demand results in rising prices. On the other hand, the leather industry has a completely different view of things and points to significantly increased production costs and at the same time lower demand in many areas, especially in the furniture industry, which they believe will lead to falling raw material prices. This actually puts the two antipodes relatively far apart. The situation is further aggravated by an extremely large difference between the prices officially published in some cases and, on the other hand, the deals actually concluded in many cases. All this leads to the fact