Market Report 25.07.2025

What happened this week

Anyone who is currently tasked with reporting on markets and activities is likely facing the same problem. There is simply too little happening to report on any noteworthy transactions or developments that could be assumed to have a real impact on prices or trends. Everyone interprets the world in a way that best suits their interests. Facts are distorted, realities are denied, and in fact it is almost always because producers are the determining forces in the markets. Over the decades, trade has been increasingly pushed back because it was assumed that the trade margin nly a cost and was not justified by function or performance. As a result, more and more producers have built up their own structures in the hope to add revenue. In addition to the hope of higher prices, they are also driven by the hope that they can control supply and thus also prices. This is a trend that has been evident in many other commodities for a long time as well. The problem with hides and skins, however, has always been that producers and users cannot really be synchronized. Hides and skins are not produced for their own sake (even if some anti-leather organizations continue to claim this), and therefore other parameters, such as the demand for meat, influence supply. The situation is not much different on the demand side, because leather is no longer a basic raw material for society, as it was a hundred years ago. When producers and users see the business as being driven exclusively by their own interests, they often end up working at cross purposes, and the regulatory force of trade, which must always observe and take both sides into account, is then lacking. This has been the case for a long time now. For some time, the supply of raw materials has not been able anymore to fully match the demand for leather, and despite falling prices, there is no longer any regulation, which further complicates the situation. As a result, more and more business is being conducted behind the scenes than ever before. Today, the advantage no longer lies so much in achieving the ‘best price’ but rather in securing customer and, very rarely, supplier relationships. The flow of goods is much more important than achieving the best price, even if most people would vehemently dispute this. We don’t have much to offer in terms of business this week. Apart from the famous flukes, there was nothing and therefore nothing that could serve as a reference for prices and market news.