Market Report 22.08.2025

What happened this week

Unfortunately, hopes that the market and demand would revive this week were dashed. Even though it was already apparent at the beginning of July that we would have to accept that the summer holiday season 2025 would be significantly quieter and, overall, significantly longer this year. This does not necessarily mean that businesses are still closed, but rather that they are focusing on internal tasks and paying less attention to the mood and position of suppliers. The concern that it might not be possible to procure the right raw materials at a reasonable price is not exactly the focus of the leather industry at the moment. Instead, the question of when and to what extent clarity about the order situation for the coming months can be achieved is the main concern. Of course, it is still too early for this, but since companies did not go into the holidays with satisfactory order books, the need to address this issue is greater than ever. Otherwise, at our level of business in Central Europe, we currently find ourselves in two parallel universes. On the one hand, despite the significant reduction in the kill, we are struggling daily with the task of finding sufficient sales at reasonable prices, and on the other hand, completely nonsensical competitive battles at the slaughterhouses are under discussion. This leads to the completely paradoxical situation that, on the one hand, prices in the leather industry are repeatedly under more or less constant pressure and, on the other hand, slaughterhouses expect higher prices for their goods and have been able to enforce these in some places due to extremely strange strategies. At the moment, this is not based on active and dynamic market activity, and those responsible will certainly have to ask themselves at some point what motivated them to do so. Of course, the potential changes resulting from possible takeovers within the beef industry play a major role for the main by-product of the slaughter industry, but on the other hand, this has nothing to do with the market situation on the world markets for leather. And this is by no means particularly positive at the moment. The decisive decisions on the direction to take are expected to be made after the trade fair in Milan, and then the situation will become clearer. As was to be expected from the above, business was relatively quiet again this week. There are always individual random transactions, but these are not significant in terms of either quantity or significance. This is unlikely to change much in the coming week.