SA SUGAR IMPORTERS WELCOME TEREOS QUITTING

THE SOUTH African Sugar Importers Association yesterday described the closure of French sugar-maker Tereos’s trading desk in the country as good news for the local sugar industry. Tereos is closing its trading branch Tereos Commodities in Kenya and South Africa, as part of its global activity review. Tereos, which reported a sharp drop in profit in the past year due mainly to a slump in global sugar prices, has been restructuring at its trading branches in recent months. Pat Dean, the head of Tereos Commodities’ white sugar unit, left the company last week. The association’s director Chris Engelbrecht said Tereos was one of the very large key sugar importers to South Africa in recent years. At one stage Tereos was the fourth largest importer of sugar into South Africa, and had been the principal supplier to Starways, the sugar importing company of Shoprite Checkers that went into liquidation in December. Engelbrecht said the addition of Tereos to the South African sugar market had helped bring sugar prices down at the time, particularly in the Western Cape. Another former large sugar importer to South Africa, Olam International, had shut its sugar trading desk at the beginning of the year, due to the low world sugar price. The London sugar price was trading at $301 (R4 561) per ton yesterday, well down from $344 per ton at the beginning of the year, while in 2016, the sugar price was more than $590 per ton. |