New York, Feb 26 - Chocolate exports from Germany, one of the world's leading producers, will fall an estimated 30 percent in 2009 due to the global financial crisis and devaluation of many currencies, a German cocoa trade group spokesman told Reuters Wednesday.
"In 2009, we think that we will have (a) double-digit percentage of less production in tonnage of cocoa beans equivalent, of the processing here, because of the lower exports," said Andreas Christiansen, German Cocoa Trade Association Chairman in Hamburg.
Germany exports about 40 percent of its chocolate mainly to the United States, England and Eastern Europe, Christiansen said.
Exports are down more than 30 percent, Christiansen said, in a telephone interview from his office in Hamburg.
"It's like a shock everybody has experienced," he said.
The German Cocoa Trade Association is made up of 28 companies. Christiansen is an intermediary between cocoa exporters and processors, and the processing industry and chocolate producers.
Christiansen said he expects global chocolate demand for the 2009 calendar year could fall into negative territory -- a bleaker picture than the International Cocoa Organization (ICO) painted in September, when the international credit crunch worsened.
Then, the ICO said it expected worldwide cocoa demand to keep growing, but at less than 2 percent year-on-year in 2008/09 -- half the 4 percent growth rate of the last three to five years.
Many countries have since entered recessions.
Germany's fourth-quarter 2008 cocoa grind, an indication of demand, fell around 17 percent year-over-year. Its grind for the whole of 2008 was at 367,177 tonnes, down 3 percent, the association of German confectionery producers BDSI said in early January.
Supply concerns hit the futures market in late 2008, pushing London cocoa futures to a 24-year peak in late January and ICE Futures U.S. cocoa to a five-month high by early February.
Talk of demand concern has since played a role in both markets, which have since dropped more than 20 percent.
Christiansen said cocoa futures remained overpriced and expected the London second-position contract to fall another 17 percent to around 1,500 pounds by the end of March, without taking speculation into account.
"Only the massive position of a few market participants in the first or second months in London are keeping this price level up, like funds and prominent trade companies," he said.
London May cocoa closed at 1,797 pounds per tonne Wednesday.
The statistical basis used in the world's top cocoa grower Ivory Coast means the 2008/09 crop year's arrival figures, which played a major role in the futures rally, lack an accurate comparison to the previous year, Christiansen said.
The arrivals are not counted in the same manner as before due to the newly formed institutions in Ivory Coast late last year as well as the increase in cocoa grinding at origin, he said.
Cocoa producers in Ivory Coast were encouraged to expand capacity in hopes of making the country the world's top grinder by 2010, industry officials said in October.