March 2025 Position Report
The March position report was released April 10th, providing some more insight to further analyze the 2024 crop size, sales, shipments, and the other dynamics that will drive the market going forward.
2024 Crop Receipts
The crop receipts continued to trickle in last month, receiving another 19 million pounds and putting the year-to-date total at 2.701 billion pounds. It is safe to say that we will finish the 2024 crop right around this level, a number that was anticipated by the industry. We anticipate a few million more pounds will be received, but not enough to change any market dynamics.
2024 Crop Quality
This season’s weighted inedible average of 3.08% is pretty much final at this point. There won’t be enough pounds received throughout the rest of the year to move the needle in either direction. 2024 was certainly an improvement over last year’s 4.23% inedible, but it’s still quite a bit higher than the sub 2% inedible that we saw in the years prior to 2023.
Shipments
Total shipments for the month were 221.37 million pounds, down 6.6% from March of 2024. The March shipments were up 3.4% over February shipments of 214.93 million pounds. Export shipments came in at 169.58 million pounds, or 2.9% down from last year. Domestic shipments though came in at 51.79 million pounds, down 17.1% from last year. This is the lowest domestic shipment month that we’ve seen in the last five years. Although the shipment numbers appear to be off, they were within industry expectation and have not played a factor in the overall market. Factoring in the March shipments and anticipating roughly the same amount in the remaining months, we are still on track for a carry out between 450-500 million pounds.
Sales
New sales for the month of March were 217.6 million pounds, up from 181.7 million pounds last year. These new sales put the industry’s sold position at 75%. Last year at this time we were 76% sold. Monthly sales have remained consistent month in and month out and we are seeing demand remain steady, if not picking up, and should for the remainder of the 2024 crop.
Market Summary
The March report came in as neutral to bullish. There wasn’t anything in the report that would indicate an instant price swing one way or the other. The steady shipments and sales have kept the market fluid and we continue to see prices slowly but steadily rise month after month. When looking at the dynamics of the market going forward, we anticipate seeing continued demand from all markets. As we’ve mentioned before, the buying habits have been different this year, with buyers taking limited coverage and only for nearby shipments. This means that buyers are still uncovered for the summer months, and supply is now starting to dwindle. There have been many factors behind this. The uncertainty of what the tariffs might do, the strengthening and weaking of the US dollar, and the uncertainty of what the crop size was truly going to be were some of the factors behind the buying habits this year. Now that we know the crop size, the tariffs have not been as big of a factor as we were concerned about, and supply is starting to run low, buyers not only need to still buy but now have the confidence that the price of almonds is not going down in a significant way any time soon.
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