By Henry Kinyua
Welcome to this weeks’ edition of the HK Coffee Market Summary: Sale number 22
The Coffee aroma continued to permeate the walls of trading at the 2nd floor of Wakulima House along Haile Selassie Avenue where the Nairobi Coffee Exchange is located and online trading platforms as sale 22 took place and completed successfully on Tuesday 26th March 2024.
The volumes traded increased to 25,930 bags from 23,930 traded in sale 21 last week. The average price decreased to $237 from $ 248 per bag achieved last week. This average price is equivalent to Kshs 96 per kilo of Cherry at the trading floor. The total earnings from the auction was $7,313,517 or 965m, which was a slight increase from $7,295,208 last week.
The highest price from the sale was $450 offered for 48 bags from Kiawamururu coffee factory from Mukurweini in Nyeri county. However in an interesting twist, this coffee received a NO BID. In short, no buyer was interested in buying that coffee at that price and did not even bid for a lower price than one offered. So Kiawamururu will have to withdraw and hopefully reoffer it next week. However it was not all that bad for Kiawamururu since they had other 3 lots that were bought. 7 bags of PB were offered at a price of $302, and 15 bags of grade C offered at a price of $187 then 67 bags of AB offered a price of $223
So the highest price of coffee that was actually bought was $400 per bag. These were 100bags, of grades AA and AB from KII factory that is part of Rung’eto Farmers’ Cooperative Society. I would like to congratulate this factory and society for always being among those that sell their coffee at a high price and I now hope that this will translate to more money into farmers’ pockets . KII factory also had other lots . In total they presented 322 bags or 19,614Kgs and fetched a total value of $126,843.
Back to the overall market, a total of 17,320 bags or 75% of all coffee traded were top grades AA and AB.
To estimate the price per kg of cherry from these market reports, lets say $400 that was the highest price paid per bag in this market, you multiply this number by the dollar rate lets say 132, you then divide the number by 50 because it is 50kgs per bag, then divide by 6.5 to get the kilos of cherry. So $400 per bag as per this report is equivalent to Kshs 162per kg of Cherry at the trading floor
One point I would like to clarify is that a report of one sale doesn’t reflect the total sales and returns from any factory, cooperative or county. Coffee is harvested, pulped, dried, milled and traded at different times. Factories and estates take coffee to the market in multiple sales (Lots) before they can compute the final price paid for all their coffee traded. So one sale or even a couple of sales are not enough to arrive at the final price to be paid to farmers but it is a good directional indicator of how the market is performing.
Brokers
In this sale 22, a total of 25,143 bags of coffee were presented to the trading floor and 25,090 were bought at the auction. The number of brokers selling coffee at the auction were 8. Alliance Berries led the pack trading 7794 bags at an average price of $245 per bag. They were closely followed by Kirinyaga Slopes with 6389 bags at an average price of $246. New KPCU followed trading 4738 bags at an average price of $248 per bag which was also the highest price achieved by any broker on the trading floor. United Eastern Kenya Coffee Marketing Company Ltd also returned to the market trading 541bags at an average price of $182 . Kiambu Coffee Marketing Limited traded 1945 bags at an average price of $224 per bag.
Coffee Buyers/Dealers
A Total of 17 buyers participated at the auction. The top 5 buyers led by Kenyacof, C.Dormans, Ibero 17%, Sasini and Taylor Winch bought 84% of the coffee traded. In the category of the least volume procured by a buyer we had Faina Enterprises Ltd purchasing 5 bags at the auction.
