Market report 17.03.2023

This week many were waiting to see if the Dubai fair would bring new insights into the markets. Even though only a few exhibitors and visitors from Europe had found their way to Dubai, the uncertainty continued here as well. As has been the case for months, many are trying to influence the markets in their favour. The news from the leather industry, on the other hand, was less encouraging. There was talk everywhere of reduced order backlogs, of delayed orders or orders that had not yet arrived and the fear that nothing fundamental in this will change in the coming months. At any rate, the mood among exhibitors and visitors was not particularly positive on balance. It is remarkable that more and more large leather factories, instead of using their capacities for their own production, prefer to offer the drums for contract work on the market. For the sake of completeness, however, it must also be mentioned that there are still and perhaps even increasingly interested parties who obviously have a better return for semi-finished products and lime splits than the tanners do for their finished leather production. Making sense of the operation would then mean, according to economic logic, that the value added in complete leather production today is lower than in separated and differentiated use. In addition to the question of whether this is actually the case, it must then also be discussed