Market Report 20.03.2026

What happened this week

There are always those weeks when, on Friday, you’re not really sure whether anything interesting has happened at all. For a long time now, this has often been due to the fact that the old dynamic of the markets no longer exists. The lively trade with many different players on both sides, the competition among traders who anticipate in both directions (suppliers and customers)—all of this has now been replaced by an ever-greater dominance of meat producers and a customer structure that is nowhere near as diverse. But in some other weeks, that’s not really the problem, and this week was no exception. The Gulf War, which continues to spread and whose consequences are still completely unforeseeable, currently dominates everything. That is not surprising, given that the effects are becoming increasingly noticeable for everyone, every day, and for Europeans it is ultimately only a secondary issue alongside the war in Ukraine. For day-to-day business, this means that once again, as little as possible is being done in the raw material trade because it’s simply impossible to predict what consequences the overall environment will have at the moment. Of course, this does not affect the slaughtering industry, as it does not have to make decisions about purchasing raw materials but only has to focus on sales. This makes their behavior puzzling in many ways, because from our perspective, a risky game has been going on for some time now, one in which little regard is given to the long-term consequences of marketing strategies. So, for day-to-day business, the question was how the week following Hong Kong would unfold. After all, we left the trade fair with considerably larger sales than we had actually expected. But perhaps we were simply too cheap—that’s always a possibility. This week, however, was overall very quiet, and the volume of additional business was very limited. There was no real post-fair business from China, and most customers who had shown some interest pointed to declining revenues for splits and were therefore not inclined to meet our price demands. The renewed weakening of the U.S. dollar did not make calculations any easier, so in the end, very little remained at the close of the week. In Europe, almost everything continues to focus on short-term, regular program planning—something a leather factory that wants to process fresh, chilled goods today simply has to do. Meanwhile, we are seeing certain difficulties in the markets for collagen and gelatine, which may also have a short-term negative impact on the market situation. The coming weeks will tell. Prices did not vary except the small fluctuations due to freight and currency.