After trading within a steady 300-310c/kg liveweight range for four months, live export steer prices at Darwin are moving higher as tightening late-dry season supply coincides with rebuilding new season demand from Indonesia.
Most big lines of quality cattle have already been exported or moved onto flood plains for shipping in November/December, exporter Patrick Underwood, managing director of Australian Cattle Exports (ACE) told Beef Central this week.
He said that while supply had tightened, orders from Indonesia had also been slower in recent months, with many feedlots at full capacity and demand quieter following the busy religious holiday periods of Eid al-Fitr (Ramadan) and Eid al-Adha.
“But after a couple of quieter months the demand started to come back,” Mr Underwood said.
“October is traditionally a month when cattle sales start to increase again in Indonesia, it is known as a traditional wedding month, so demand has picked up and some of that stock in feedlots has started to move through.”
November and December will also be an important shipping period to supply feeder cattle to Indonesian feedlots in time for next year’s Lebaran period in March and April 2025, which is also helping to stimulate demand.
Mr Underwood estimates that about 60,000 cattle are on floodplains in the Northern Territory in preparation for the November to December wet-season shipping period.
Elsewhere NT cattle numbers are now getting hard to find. Exports from Broome finished early following a light wet season, while the price for cattle in Queensland has been rising in recent weeks.
That combination of factors has caused prices in Darwin to kick with feeder steer rates jumping from 305c to 320c in the past week, medium steers 280c to 300c and feeder heifers 240 to 265c.
Mr Underwood said there are still boats moving with exporters buying smaller lots of cattle and sharing boats, however, most of the big lines of quality cattle had been moved already, and attention will soon turn to the large numbers of cattle assembled on the flood plains.
Most of those cattle were moved onto flood plain country later than usual this year due to the prolonged wet season.
As a result most vendors would not be looking to move them until at least early November, but the risk of running into cyclones also means they will most likely all be sold, mustered and shipped by mid-December.
On current market conditions in Vietnam, Mr Underwood said the rapid rise in heavy cattle prices to above $3/kg liveweight in Queensland back in July had caught many buyers by surprise.
With options to source cattle at cheaper prices from neighbouring countries such as Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, Vietnamese orders for Australian cattle had slowed in response to the higher prices of recent months.
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