According to EastFruit analysts, the prices paid for apples intended for processing into apple juice and concentrate have fallen significantly last week. As the harvest has continued in domestic farms and the industrial apple supply from Belarus has increased, prices have been declining almost daily.
While early in the previous week prices stood at $ 0.12 per kg, by Friday they had dropped to $ 0.10-0.09 per kg. Local producers are reacting to the price dynamics faster than the suppliers of Belarusian apples, so their sales are going much faster. At the moment, processors have already ceased to buy apples for more than $ 0.09 per kg. Also, some processors have started to demand a more substantial delay in the payments for the apples supplied to them.
Nevertheless, even such a price is still almost twice as high as that currently paid to producers in Moldova, Poland and Ukraine. Moreover, in these countries, the delay in the payments already exceeds 60 days. Some growers even doubt that processors will fully pay what they were promised, given the threat of a huge supply of concentrate.
Under these conditions, Russian industrial apple processors will also have a hard time selling finished products, because almost all the countries mentioned above and even Belarus are preparing to produce record quantities of apple concentrate.