China Mink Skins Market Review-March 2022
Traditonally, February and March should be the starting moment for skin dealers and fur coat producers to dump their cash in auctions and bring the new skins for their business in the year. But until now, China skins dealers and garment producers are keeping still, so what is the situation now in China’s fur industry?
The Chinese Economy 2021 4Q and 2022 January & February.
The China GDP increasing rate was down to 4% on 4th Quarter 2021, and the growth of retail sales plunged to 1.7 percent in December from 3.9 percent in November. Last year, China was attempting to modernize its economic structure by reducing lending in the housing market, implementing carbon neutrality policy, and limiting the monopoly on online platforms. These strategies overlapped with the epidemic and the trade war with the United States, and significantly hampered economic development.
As a result, people’s uncertainties about jobs and reduced earnings have blocked people’s willingness to spend. To mitigate the fluctuation, in March, the Chinese government announced the tax reduction plan at a recent government economy conference. In addition, other monetary easing policies will be adopted soon, which is expected to improve consumer spending this year.
The Epidemic
China is still applying the “zero tolerance” policy to control the epidemic, cities are closed from time to time, and the latest city fully quarantined is Shenzhen. In that case, people won’t like to travel and try to avoid public attendance.
The Fur Coat Sale in 2021 Season.
The total quantity of fur coats sales before the spring festival was around 50% of the number sold in the same period of the year 2020, Fur coat sales in the following 2022 spring festival period wasn’t very promising too, very few customers were shown in the shopping mall, fur coats offline shop sales were hit seriously, online sales were better than the off-line sales.
Skins Inventory in China
There are still a big number of skins bought in the year 2021 that haven’t been used for the garments, many fur speculators and garments producers, who have bought before 2021 July, were in deep loss and can’t sell their skins out because of the sharp price plunging in the second half of 2021, some of them have bought skins with high financial leverage, therefore, selling skins with current market prices will have them bankrupted.
The Total Supply this year.
In the year 2022, The total mink skins available from KF and SAGA are to be around 26 million pics (12 million from KF and 14 million from SAGA), in the year 2021 the total quantity available is 23 million, of which 16 million pics were sold to buyers. So, garment producers in China believe that the total supply this year will be far more than they need, even without considering the skin inventory in China.
The Ukraine War
The news of the Ukraine war causing the mink reduction was well noted in the China market, but buyers’ mindsets are equally affected by consumer spending of fur coats in 2021, the inventory in China and the new skins available in auctions this year.
China Local Skins Production
The total production of China’s local mink is around 6.5 million, in which many are brown, white and silver-blue, the quality and grade are kept improving because of the importing of the Danish mink breeders, shorter or classical naps skins are produced.
In general, the supply of pelts is still temporarily greater than demand, but the new economic policy of the China government and the reduction of European production will lead to a new balance.