QUOTE(lowya @ Mar 20 2017, 10:37 AM)
shouldn't lower cocoa price leads to lower GCB's material costs hence improve margin? The demand is in the form of end of product chocolate should not be affected by commodity prices.
Imaging how much chocolate we humanly need to eat is not depending on the price of it right?
This is how contango works.. it works for all commodity intermediate business (ie those who dont produce raw materials nor finished goods). Cocoa beans ->cocoa butter/mass -> chocolate consumer products
Lets imagine that the cocoa products is falling continuously for 3 months..
If you are a farmer/plantation.. you sure lose money, as your products matures and you cannot sell at good price. This one is easy peasy.
If you are a intermediate producer, you must have some existing raw material in your factory and some existing finished good at warehouse. If the price of cocoa products fall continuously what will happen?
The raw materials you bought last time is much higher priced than current raw materials. Oops no 1.
The finished goods you have in your warehouse is produced using higher priced raw materials, and now the price is lower. So you will make less margin. Opps no 2.
Continuously getting Oops no 1 and Opps no 2, when ever they buy raw materials will be unsustainable.. for the profit
If you are a consumer goods manufacturer, your intermediate product cost are getting lower each day, but those consumer products price is static, so you earn more.
So GCB is more of a intermediate producer although they have some manufacturing of consumer goods. Depend which one is higher percentage of sales. Unless of course if they hedge their cocoa prices (provided they hedge the product and not the raw materials, then results will be better, if they hedge the raw materials at higher price, then double kaboom)
This works in reverse as well, look at how Petron benefit hugely from a reverse contango recently (oil price going up)
This post has been edited by gark: Mar 20 2017, 10:53 AM