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By: Josh Linville, Vice President- Fertilizer
Urea markets ended 2025 with a sense that prices were finally beginning to match an improving supply backdrop. Buyers had become less urgent, and sellers were working through nearby shipment windows while demand looked more orderly. That tone has shifted as a series of developments have pulled attention back to the near-term balance and the market’s sensitivity to timing. When momentum turns, the urea market can rebuild a risk premium faster than fundamentals alone would justify.
Josh Linville, StoneX VP of Fertilizer, focuses on why urea pricing can rebound sharply when purchasing calendars, production constraints, and geopolitical headlines converge at the same time.
Linville describes a setup where the world appeared better supplied than it had been a year earlier, which helped drain some of the urgency from buyers. He notes that India and China were contributing to a more comfortable global balance and that “Russia is still exporting a lot” while the European outlook was improving. That supply improvement made late-year pricing harder to justify, especially when he observed that prices around the world were still meaningfully higher than the prior year. As he put it, “Econ 101 says that is not the way the markets are supposed to work”, and the market began to scale back as buyers looked sufficiently covered.
The shift higher is being driven by a rapid sequence of bullish inputs that has changed how participants think about near-term availability. Linville points first to demand timing, saying India announced a tender “at least 30 days earlier than we expected”, which can force buyers and sellers to reprice quickly. He also highlights supply-side constraints in Iran where “Iranian production is going to take a hit because it’s been cold there”, with gas being redirected to residential heating. Layered on top of those factors, he argues the market is reacting to repeated headlines, concluding that “we’ve just been taking punch after punch” and that it is difficult for prices to drop while the bulls keep being fed.
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--- Written by Frédéric Guétin, StoneX TV Producer
--- Expert: Josh Linville, StoneX VP of Fertilizer
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