Volume hits 5-month low at Coonoor tea auction

The volume offered for sale 38 of the auctions of Coonoor Tea Trade Association to be held on Thursday and Friday has crashed to 18.12 lakh kg.

This is the lowest volume of the past five months. The previous low was 15.05 lakh kg on April 23.

This week’s offer is as much as 2.13 lakh kg less than last week’s offer.

Producers said that arising from lack of adequate sunshine hours, the harvest in the fields has been affected. This, in turn, reduced the volume of manufactured teas and hence the arrival of stocks for the auctions.

Of the 18.12 lakh kg offered for this week’s auctions, as much as 16.71 lakh kg belongs to CTC variety and only 1.41 lakh kg orthodox variety. The proportion of orthodox teas continues to be low in both leaf and dust grades. In the leaf tea counter, only 91,000 kg belongs to orthodox while 12.71 lakh kg, CTC. Among the dust tea, only 50,000 kg belongs to orthodox while 4 lakh kg, CTC. In all, 13.62 lakh kg belongs to Leaf grades and 4.50 lakh kg, Dust grades.

Homedale Estate’s Broken Pekoe CTC grade, auctioned by Global Tea Auctioneers Pvt Ltd., topped the entire auctions last week when Nisha Enterprises bought it for ₹306 a kg. This tea from a small-scale bought leaf factory was the only one to fetch above ₹300/kg. Among other CTC teas, Vigneshwar Estate got ₹222, Crosshill Estate Premium ₹216, Pinewood Estate ₹211, Shanthi Supreme ₹210 and Waver Tree ₹201. Overall, teas worth ₹4.62 crore remained unsold as there were no takers for as much as 25 per cent of the offer.

Quotations with the brokers indicated ₹74-82 a kg for plain Leaf grades and ₹140-164 for the best grades. For plain Dust grades, they ranged ₹72-80 and for the best grades, ₹152-201.