Dear All,

I hope all’s well with you.

We would like to share the actual market situation for dried apricots with you as follows.

The apricot market is very volatile these days depending on different news coming from the fields. As you know that we had a frost damage on new crop apricots on 18.03.2013 and the first estimations were changing between %30 - 40 damage. These estimations were not so healthy cause the new crop apricots were at flower stage at the frost night. To be able to say something concrete, we must see the fruit percentage come out of the damaged flowers. I think we will have a better idea about the frost damage within 10 days time. We are not so much pessimistic and our estimation is around %20 damage on new crop presently.

Everybody is focused on the weather conditions in the next days. The weather forecast is showing another cold stream for Malatya on 10.04.2013 so the farmers are not willing to sell their stocks under current conditions. They are expecting better price levels in the coming days for themselves naturally.

The valley of Malatya is damaged however the mountain area has no problem so far. Therefore we are not expecting the market to be effected more than %10 pricewise if there won't be any additional frost damage in the coming days. There will be a certain carry over quantity at the end of this season which we estimate to be around 50.000 mtons. The big part of the carry over quantity exists small size apricots. The subject quantity will minimize the effects of the frost in the market. Actually, it is a good practice to have a slight shortage on new crop apricots as the market needs bigger sizes for the new season. There was a big shortage on big sizes this season and the prices have gone up so much. According to our opinion, the price difference between big and small sizes will be smaller next season due to shorter crop size for crop 2013 goods.

We also would like to share the following statistics with you for the export quantities of dried apricots during the new season in comparision to last season.

Please kindly find below our indicative price levels for the main types of apricots just to update your information.

Type 3 apricots at US$ 3.675.-/Mt.
Type 4 apricots at US$ 3.275.-/Mt.
Type 6 apricots at US$ 2.625.-/Mt.
Type 8 apricots at US$ 1.825.-/Mt.
Diced apricots 8-10 mm at US$ 1.950.-/Mt.
Industrial apricots at US$ 1.575.-/Mt.
All prices are FOB Izmir, Prompt shipments, Crop 2012, Subject To Final Confirmation.

Looking forward to hear from you.

Best regards, 
Yasin Durmus 
Managing Director