While producers are waiting for some pre-Christmas impulse, quotations are reportedly unchanging.

For seasonal reasons, the quantities of pigs for slaughter are high, meeting strong demand from several slaughter companies.

The market situation is altogether balanced, with price improvements failing to appear within the meat market, according to market participants from all sides.

As a result, quotations have remained steady in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium.

Without a trendsetting signal sent from the German leading quotation, it is quite a difficult issue for the European environment to cope with.

This is what the undertone is like in talks between various market participants. The Danish quotation - which was able to go up somewhat last week - remains on an unchanged level this week.

Slightly weaker slaughter pig quotations have been reported from Italy and Great Britain. Italy is also still going through some supply pressure. In Great Britain, there have been complaints about high slaughter weights on low demand in the spot market.

^{_{(Source: ISN - Interessengemeinschaft der Schweinehalter Deutschlands)}}

^{_{1) corrected quotation: The official Quotations of the different countries are corrected, so that each quotation has the same base (conditions).
2) These quotations are based on the correction formulas applied since 01.08.2010.
base: 57 per cent lean-meat-percentage; farm-gate-price; 79 per cent killing-out-percentage, without value-added-tax}}

Trend for the German market

At the beginning of the week, demand for pigs for slaughter continues to be very vivid on the part of the slaughter companies. So, the price development may be expected to be steady to friendly at least.