The Turkish citrus season has mostly been a stable one, says Esra Soyleyen, managing partner of Turkish fruit exporter Aksun. Most of the citrus are doing well, except for one single product, which is seeing demand decrease every year: "Overall, in Europe the temperatures were quite high and all other countries had enough mandarins, grapefruits, lemons. Sales were stable, but there was lots of price pressure to run bigger volumes. Demand for lemons has been stable. Which meant that we were easily able to plan for the entire season. The demand for oranges and mandarins keep increasing every year, as customers prefer to have more sweet options than grapefruits. This inevitably means that the opposite is true for grapefruits, as demand for that fruit is going down every season."
Looking at the competition, Soyleyen acknowledges that Egypt has become a player in the European market to take seriously. "Egypt was already strong with oranges in the past few years and we feel this a lot as country. Traffic of Turkish oranges to Europe was always very slow, because of the big players like Spain, Greece and now Egypt also supplying the market. But it's not only oranges. For mandarins we're feeling the pressure as well, because they have good varieties, a huge crop and low prices. On top of that their timing is nearly the same as ours. Especially for Murcott, we see strong competition and a negative effect for us as a country."
As the crisis in the Red Sea poses challenges to many exporters, Aksun has also had to cancel some contracts as a result,. Soyleyen explains: "We do have many different customers with whom we schedule seasonal citrus programs. These clients are from Europe, the Far East, USA, Canada and Japan. As such, the Red Sea crisis has affected us very heavily, because we do have seasonal contracted volumes for Japan and when the Red Sea crisis surfaced in one night, we were forced to stop all loadings to this destination."
The Turkish citrus season is still ongoing and for Soyleyen, the coming weeks seem very straight forward, without any surprises: "We're still doing lemons, grapefruits and Valencia oranges and prices are very stable in the past few weeks, maybe even months. As long as we have a good team to harvest the right quality and enough facilities to keep these fruits safe in cold rooms, with the right humidity and firmness, we always see a big opportunity for Aksun to cover the customer demands for as long as possible."
"We have contracted programs for grapefruits until the end of May, so we will be covering the contracted volumes with good quality for sure. For lemons, our plan is to finish the program around mid-April, as we started to see some quality issues and lower shelf life test results. For oranges, because we are also covering domestic retailer business, we will be doing oranges for a few months longer, which means that, while we'll be packing summer fruits like watermelons, peaches and nectarines, we'll still be packing citrus as well," Soyleyen concludes.
For more information:
Esra Soyleyen
Aksun
Tel: +90 324 2344190
Mob: +90 533 950 63 10
Email: Esra.soyleyen@aksun.com.tr
www.aksun.com.tr