Fonterra has record quarterly exports, hires own vessel
BUSINESSDESK: Fonterra achieved record exports of 620,000 tonnes in the final three months of its season.
Its 2012 May, June and July shipments were 36% more than the corresponding period last year, reinforcing the 2011-12 record milk production by its 10,500 dairy farmer members. Total milk production was up 10% on 2010-11.
“We traditionally ship just over 450,000 tonnes at this time of year, but we’ve had a lot more product to move and this has meant some creative planning across the wider supply chain to manage and store the additional volumes,” Fonterra NZ milk products managing director Gary Romano says.
“For the first time since Fonterra was formed, we chartered our own break-bulk vessel to send product to the Middle East.”
Mr Romano says though dairy product demand usually lifts ahead of the Islamic month of Ramadan, the demand spike was more than expected.
“There was not enough available container capacity at that time of year. This meant Fonterra had to charter its own vessel to take 7500 tonnes of products to ports in Dubai and Saudi [Arabia].”
The new dairy season has just begun.
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Comments and questions6
Ganbatte! Keep up the good work, farmers.
You lead the way to the country's economic recovery!!
Well goldarn and wowee with a geewhiz thrown in for good measure, who would've thought, a monopoly making a profit!!
Slap my butt with a wet towel.
John Morrison.....what a beauty. Love your style.
Like a broken record. Move on bro
Fonterra will enjoy vastly greater commercial success for its owners, the farmers when and only when they can move from measuring everything in terms only of commodity milk solid returns and being so utterly short sighted to allowing the commercial heads in organisation to develop the value added business where the returns are immeasurably better. Commodity price taking is the habit of a lifetime but it all depends on which way the wind blows. The overseas operations on Fonterra are massivley skewered to moving commodity product and the value added parts of the business are starved of resources.
And that is a direct result of our high labour costs. As with our trees it is more economical to export the raw material and import back the processed results. If, and as we want them.