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By: Josh Linville, Vice President- Fertilizer
Australia
With much of the 1st half 2023 global urea price trend being lower which made it incredibly difficult/loss inducing to bring solid starting urea inventories, it currently feels extremely tightly supplied at many points around Australia. It doesn't help that eastern global markets remain tightly supplied as well as Chinese exports and production issues have caused available "close by" supplies to be difficult to find and high priced. As a result:
Australian values are likely to hold/push higher as demand continues to outpace in place supply
Unfortunately, this is forcing importers to secure tonnage from production regions further away. Paying premium values to secure a loading slot and the longer distance combing for a higher cost import will not help short term.
NOLA/New Orleans, Louisiana
Price comparisons
Middle East
Number 1 exporter (as a region, not as individual nations)
Number 4 global exporter in 2022
Price comparisons
Number 1 global exporter in 2022
Price comparisons
Number 9 global exporter in 2022
Price comparisons
Number 2 global importer in 2022
Price comparisons
We believe that only looking at the flat price of either grains or fertilizer can be misleading:
We look at the ratio "value" to get a better indication of where we are or how many bushels of X does it take to pay for 1 ton of fertilizer.
Would you rather:
When we compare the current ratio value against recent years, we start to see if we are high or low.
YOUR VALUES WILL LOOK DIFFERENT
This graph looks at the NOLA urea price vs the flat grain price. There are no logistics on either product. Your location will look different due to fertilizer logistical costs, grain basis, etc.
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