Sugar Waiting at Brazil’s Ports Rises 9.5% on China Shipments

July 19th, 2012

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Category: Sugar

(Bloomberg) – The amount of sugar waiting to be loaded at main ports in Brazil, the world’s largest producer, climbed 9.5 percent on increased shipments to China, according to shipping agency Williams Servicos Maritimos Ltda.

About 3.04 million metric tons was ready for loading yesterday at Vitoria, Paranagua and Santos, according to Williams Brasil in Recife. That was up from 2.78 million tons a week earlier. About 22 percent of all the sugar, or 679,500 tons, was scheduled to go to China, the second-biggest global consumer of sugar after India.

“The congestion created at the Brazilian ports is made of old sales and the traditional shipments to the Gulf, MENA and African refineries,” Naim Beydoun, a broker at Swiss Sugar Brokers in Rolle, Switzerland, said in a report e-mailed yesterday. China is unlikely to maintain the pace of imports, with some buyers already looking to sell back sugar, he said.

China is forecast to import 3.1 million tons of the sweetener in the 2011-12 season begun in October, 1 million tons more than a year earlier, the International Sugar Organization in London estimates. Imports in the first eight months of the season totaled 2.33 million tons, up from 824,000 tons a year earlier, it said.

The possibility of slowing Chinese imports is “the only bearish story” in sugar, Gordon Wayne, a strategist at UBS AG in New York, said in a report e-mailed yesterday. Above-average rain in Brazil’s center south, the country’s main growing region, has delayed harvesting and shipments.

Sugar output in the region fell 29 percent to 6.7 million tons from the start of the 2012-13 season there through the end of June, according to data from industry group Unica. Raw sugar traded in New York climbed 8.2 percent last month.

To contact the reporter on this story: Isis Almeida in London at ialmeida3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net.

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