Welcome to our week 29 Update. Lots has been happening in the world of kiwifruit. The latest is that the Crown have issued a notice of appeal to the decision of the High Court in favour of the kiwifruit grower claimants in the case of the outbreak of PSA V in New Zealand. While it was predicted, it is still disappointing. The matter has always been about accountability and acceptance of accountability. It seems that concept has still to sink in. The claimants, including Seeka, have 10 days to counter appeal and our lawyers are working on this now.
The second important update relates to the sales rates. At the beginning of week 29, Zespri had over 25m more trays of kiwifruit to sell than at the same time last year. While the total volume of Hayward produced by growers recovered to more normal volumes, close to the same volume has been sold year on year – noting that last year was a short volume year. And surprisingly, 11m of the increased volume to sell year on year is in SunGold. Everyone now is watching the sales rate to witness any increase that might diminish the need to dump fruit.
Loadouts have continued to be slow. Fruit loss statistics are artificially low as suppliers only check and rework fruit as we are about to load it out. No load outs equals no checking which equals no fruit loss. Thankfully we do have a normal level of loadouts in week 30.
There are some unusual things going on. Alarmingly the national pool, through Zespri, has been buying back some lines of Hayward fruit with poor quality – through a quality withdraw process. This is very early in the year to do this, and there is no real rationale for all growers to be subsidising others through this process. As a large Hayward grower, we have raised this as an issue with KGI, and as a supplier we are unhappy that Zespri might preferentially treat some suppliers this way.
Seeka has made a number of announcements over the last two weeks with significant investments in increased packing, precooling and coolstores at Oakside, and a new packing shed, packing machines, precooling and coolstorage at Kerikeri. The combined value of the capital spend over $35m in the next two years. We continue to responsibly have sufficient coolstore and packing capacity to do a good job for our supplying growers.
Kind regards
Michael
Seeka Key
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