During the first three weeks of September, there wasn’t a single "price movement" in sulphur; rather, there were two diverging movements. The seller side held its ground, while the buyer side eroded. This divergence reveals far more than the numbers themselves.
The Producer Side Is Frozen; the Delivered Side Is Melting
Over the course of three weeks, almost all free on board (FOB) export benchmarks remained unchanged. The Middle East, Iran, the Baltic, and both coasts of North America all stayed in place. Conversely, cost and freight (CFR) delivered references faced downside adjustments across the board in North Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and China.
The same driver has produced this dynamic in the market for years: sellers defend their offer lists, while buyers negotiate at the discharge point. The resulting gap comes out of freight rates and trader margins, not the producer's netback. In short, the entity caught in the middle is the trader in the supply chain.
The practical takeaway is this: both those looking at FOB prices and declaring "the market is firm" and those looking at CFR prices and declaring "the market is falling" appear to be right. Both represent data from the exact same week.
The Real Movement Happened Inside China
The sharpest move of the three-week period occurred not in imports, but in China’s domestic market, where domestic prices dropped by nearly 5% within a single week. During the same period, import references delivered to China barely budged.
This widening spread means imported cargoes are losing competitiveness within China. This is the critical signal for exporters: while the delivered quotation to China appears stable, the arbitrage window is quietly closing. You cannot see this by looking solely at published quotations, nor can you see it without tracking domestic prices.
Floors Break, Ceilings Hold
The character of the movement is just as important as its direction. Across Black Sea exports, Brazil, and South Africa, the low end of price ranges shifted downward while the high end held.
A widening price spread tells a different story than a simple price decline: consensus in the market has weakened. There is no single universally accepted price level; pricing forms deal by deal and buyer by buyer. In times like these, published mid-point averages cease to be reliable reference points—what really matters is who is under time pressure.
South Africa posted the only upward move this week, yet looking across the full three weeks, its floor remains significantly lower. This is not a bullish signal; it is volatility driven by thin liquidity.
Regional Gaps Are Driven by Freight, Not Product Specs
The cost of transport from the Middle East to East India and South Africa is more than triple the cost of shipping from the Black Sea to North Africa. The bulk of the CFR price difference between these regions stems from distance, not product differentiation.
The conclusion is simple yet often overlooked: comparing delivered prices side-by-side and stating "market X is yielding better returns" is misleading. Comparisons only make sense when netbacked to the same point of origin.
Observations From Our Own Desk
Over the same six-week window, we received 28 distinct inquiries totaling 1.28 million metric tons.
The total volume itself is less telling than its distribution:
- Two inquiries accounted for 47% of the total volume. Each was for 300,000 metric tons, and both were destined for China. The remaining 26 inquiries accounted for less than half of the total volume.
- Ten inquiries were under 10,000 metric tons, collectively accounting for less than 2% of total volume. Time is spent on this end, while volume sits on the other.
- Only 5 of the 28 inquiries advanced to the Letter of Intent (LOI) stage—a conversion rate of 18%.
- At least a third of the inquiring parties were intermediaries presenting themselves as direct buyers.
The heavy concentration of demand targeting China coincided with the decline in Chinese domestic prices during those same three weeks. Large-volume inquiries are chasing a market with weakening domestic pricing. Just because the tonnage is large does not make those inquiries any more real.
The only destination repeating on our desk was East Africa: Dar es Salaam was inquired about through three separate channels. Yet that region exhibited the most volatile price spread of the three-week period.
Conclusion
The takeaway from these three weeks is not simply that "prices fell." The real summary is that prices froze at origin, melted at destination, and market consensus fractured. In periods like this, profitability comes not from predicting the market, but from discipline: identifying genuine buyers, withholding intelligence until formal documentation arrives, and normalizing every delivered price back to the same point of origin before making a comparison.
Inquiries are abundant. Real buyers are scarce.
