Current topic: Wax availability and price trends, status autumn 2021
The interlocking world of raw materials has been out of joint in recent months. It started with a reduction in demand for many products due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Less was consumed and less was bought in many industries. This led to factories shutting down production and selling products at very low prices.
Natural oils are also used in some cases as additives to fuels and there were significantly lower sales volumes of e.g. rapeseed oils for E10 or E5 fuel due to the reduced car traffic.
In terms of standard waxes such as paraffin, we saw prices for some products more than 30% lower in summer 2020 than in 2019. Due to the uncertainties as to when the lockdown would be over, hardly any large processors bought large quantities in the long term.
In autumn 2020, this changed significantly again and large volumes were concluded - in some cases again at pre-Corona prices.
Since the beginning of 2021, we are now seeing extremely rising prices and availability. Rapeseed oils, for example, as raw material for rapeseed wax and soy oil for soy wax are about twice as expensive as in 2020, soy wax is totally scarce due to limited capacity for scaling over the last months, as production capacities are not sufficient.
Palm waxes and stearic acids (based on palm oil) are also seeing unprecedented price levels.
In addition to high demand, extreme freight rates for overseas shipments are playing a big role. If we paid about 1200 USD freight for a full container of wax from Asia to bring it to Hamburg as recently as November 2020, we now pay between 9000 and 13000 USD per container. Often containers are not shipped because the capacity, especially for heavy containers, is not there on the ships.
We currently expect extremely high prices for paraffin, rapeseed and palm stearins, soy wax and rapeseed wax until the end of this year. Beyond that, we do not dare to make a forecast yet.
Only products such as beeswaxes, shea butter and carnauba wax are currently at a relatively normal, stable price level. The main uses of these products are in sectors affected by the Corona pandemic, such as the cosmetics industry. But here, too, demand is rising again and we expect prices to rise in this raw material segment as well.
(Our rapeseed wax is very scarce at the moment - but we will get new goods next week and ship as soon as possible).
