SYDNEY: Amid record international wool prices, Australia’s long-struggling wool growers are asking themselves if they should finally be feeling comfortable. International prices for wool – for a century Australia’s most lucrative export commodity – soared to new highs in 2017, peaking at 1700 cents per kilo on the Eastern Market Indicator.
At the Yennora Wool Centre in Sydney’s west, Bathurst-region farmer Murray Smith grabs some fibre from one of the hundreds of sample boxes in the sales room.
“This is what’s fetching the big money at the moment; 18-micron, possibly bringing 1,600 cents per kilo,” he tells SBS News.
“This time last year, the same merino was bringing probably 1100 cents.” Farmer Murray Smith with some wool samples. “I think it’s a boom,” says Sydney-based wool broker Scott Carmody.
“(But) I don’t like to say the word ‘boom’ because that indicates the price can’t go higher and that it’s extraordinary. I just think we’re at the right price, it’s probably been a long time coming.”China has long accounted for at least 70 per cent of Australia’s wool exports and is mostly responsible for the recent price spurt – especially for super-fine wool, defined as 17.6 to 18.5 microns in diameter.
But until six or seven years ago, wool manufacturing in China was focused on its own export market, including sales to top European suit makers.
Today Chinese factories are eyeing more than one billion increasingly affluent domestic consumers, keen on a premium product that for years had lost ground to cheaper synthetics.
