Rubber exports are making their final stretch forward on a liquid latex foot, but may finish the fiscal a pretty notch below last year’s robust base of 56,545 tonne. Just a week ahead of the fiscal-end, rubber exports totalled about 49,000 tonne (provisional estimates).
Rubber Board had originally targeted an export of 70,000 tonne for the current fiscal. This was first rolled back to 25,000 tonne following the viral fever havoc in plantations and ramped up latter to 50,000 tonne. Going by the present trend, rubber exports are likely to make a photofinish at the targeted 50,000 tonne, KG Srinivasan, market research officer, Rubber Board, told FE.
Against last year’s 8.53 lakh tonne of rubber output, India is expecting to produce 8.25 lakh tonne this year. At the same time, some champagne cheer for the domestic tyre industry is that it is not the tyremen’s coveted sheet rubber that’s growing in the rubber export basket, but the centriguged latex. Liquid latex, barely 28% of the total exports in 2006-07 (16,056 tonne out of total exports of 56,545 tonne) has bubbled up to happy 40.6% of the total rubber exports so far. Experts point out that this may be because as much as 50% of the sheet rubber produced is mopped by the domestic tyre industry. Domestic price of sheet rubber is crawling around Rs 10-11 per kilo below the international price, sustaining an export-tempting climate. In February, this margin was as wide as Rs 13.5 per kilo. Usually the exports are considered unviable only when the margin is not at least Rs 6 per kilo. Automative Tyre Manufacturers Association (ATMA) has been maintaining that there is an availability issue for rubber stocks, compounded by hoarding.
There is little tapping in the plantations these days and the RSS-4 price is not exactly at its peak at Rs 101 per kilo.
But the sentiments are running high among farmers and stockists. “By mid-April, domestic prices for sheet rubber is likely to cross Rs 112 per kilo on high demand,” says Josekutty Antony, a rubber nursery owner.
Rubber dealers have raised apprehensions at “domestic buyers pummelling down the price of sheet rubber” with “misinformation on international price”. “The Indian buyers are trying to rob the farmers of a price picnic up to Rs 107 per kilo, when the rubber stocks are at their leanest,” alleged Rubber Dealers’ Association in a statement in Kottayam.