China's pork import market 2017

The key factors, which could explain China’s declining pork import in 2017, are listed as follows:

• Firstly, increased domestic pork supply - the slaughtering volume of fixed hog slaughterhouses in China reached 221.82 million head in 2017, growing by 6.3% than 2016.
• Secondly, decreased domestic pork prices - the annual average live pig price was CNY14.8 per kg in 2017, declining by 19% on a y-o-y basis. A similar scenario was experienced with the domestic pig carcass price, which went down by 15% from CNY24.4 per kg in 2016 to CNY20.8 per kg in 2017. As a result, the price gap between domestic and imported pork was greatly narrowed.
• Thirdly, the domestic end-consumers traditionally prefer fresh pork to frozen pork, while the latter was mainly purchased by domestic food processing enterprises.

In terms of the market share of pork exporters to China, Spain exported, in total, 237,514 tons of pork to China in 2017, ranking top among all exporting countries. With a market share of 19.5%, Spain was followed by Germany (17.4%) and Canada (13.7%).

Ranking the 5th among all offal exporters and with a market share of 10.1%, the offal export of Spain to China increased by 12.8% in 2017 on a y-o-y basis. Compared with other offal export countries, it also achieved the largest incremental quantity of 14,213 tons in 2017, partly because a number of new Spanish plants were approved to export offal to China, or previous bans were lifted in 2017.