With market demand for the Christmas season picking up, August to November is normally a busy period for shrimp farmers and processors in Vietnam. It was, therefore, expected that demand would finally increase after summer and would bring about the much-awaited price recovery.
However, as ShrimpTails forecasted in its third edition, this did not really happen. According to the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP), the value of shrimp exports dropped by 4.1 percent to USD 2.6 billion (EUR 2.27 billion) in the first nine months of 2018 compared to the same period in 2017.
This decline was mainly accounted for by exports of marine shrimp (-28.2 percent) and to a lesser extent black tiger shrimp (-28 percent). In contrast, the total export value of Pacific white shrimp (L. vannamei) increased slightly at 1.3 percent, but with a 10 percent increase in export volume, the average export price-per-kg of Pacific white shrimp declined significantly.
