Coffee production in Colombia, the world’s No. 2 producer of the beans, plunged 33 percent in the first four months of the year, with exports sinking by 21 percent, officials said on Friday.
The National Coffee Growers Federation, or Federacafe, said production in the first four months was 2.88 million 60kg bags, compared with 4.25 million bags in the same period last year.
“The winter, low fertilization and the renovation of coffee plantations had a strong impact on production in the first months of the year,” said Federacafe, which represents the Andean country’s half million coffee growers.
Colombia comes second only to Brazil in coffee production. Much of the country’s northwest is cloaked in the crop.
But the federation stressed the outlook for this year remained encouraging and that despite the first months of the year they would “maintain a production projection of between 10.5 and 11.5 million bags for the year.”
International sales slipped to 3.178 million bags, down 21 percent from the 4.041 million exported from January to April last year.
Total Colombian production last year dipped 9 percent to 11.5 million bags from 12.6 million bags in 2007, but total harvest revenues swelled to a record US$1.953 billion, according to official numbers.
Separately, Ethiopian coffee exports are expected to fall by 30 percent to 40 percent this year and next year, but the country hopes to become the world’s biggest sesame seed exporter this year, the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) said on Friday.
Ethiopian officials have blamed bad weather for near total crop failure in some southern growing zones this season, and ECX chief executive Eleni Gabre-Madhin said the global economic slowdown was also hurting overseas sales.
“This year we’re likely to see a 30 to 40 percent shortfall in coffee export earnings relative to last year,” she said in an interview at her office in Addis Ababa.
Coffee accounted for some 60 percent of Ethiopia’s foreign exchange revenue in the 2007 to 2008 season, when it earned more than US$525 million from exports of 170,888 tonnes of mostly high quality arabica beans.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by