Corn beats expected US trade inspections, but soy and wheat lag

US corn inspections in the week ending February 22 came out higher than analysts’ expectations, but soybeans and wheat expectations fell short of the expected ranges.

Corn

Corn continued its strong trend, beating the upper end of analysts' 800,000-1.05 million expectations as 1.31 million mt was inspected.

This was up 367,754 mt on the previous week, but still some 154,000 mt short of the same period in 2017.

The cumulative total for the current campaign is just shy of 18 million mt exported, which is 31% behind last year.

All the US Gulf Coast exports departed from the Mississippi River, with majority of the 719,300 mt heading to Mexico (129,362 mt) and Saudi Arabia (114,809 mt).

Meanwhile, half of the Pacific Northwest volumes headed towards Korea (266,517 mt), with the remaining half being shipped to Japan (116,088 mt) and Indonesia (68,879 mt).

Wheat

Wheat tonnage at 280,243 mt fell short of the expected range of 375,000-525,000 mt set by analysts.

The volume is down 34% on the previous week and down 48% on the same period last marketing year.

But total US wheat exports for the year to date are at 17.8 million mt, 6% behind the same point last year.

Hard Red Winter wheat formed the bulk of the exports, and accounted for 85,406 mt, or 46% of all wheat leaving the US, with the bulk being shipped from the Pacific Northwest.

Columbia bought nearly all of the Hard Red Winter wheat with their weekly purchases totalling at 85,235 mt.

Soybeans

As with corn, analsyts had expected soybean exports to come in between 800,000-1.05 million mt, but inspected volumes came in at 761,961 mt.

This was down 200,000 mt from the week before, but up 50,000 mt compared to the same point last year.

The largest volumes left from the Mississippi River and went to China (202,820 mt), followed by Egypt (110,076 mt) and Japan (45,598 mt).