India’s soyoil imports are poised to surge 60% year-on-year to a record high in 2024/25, as refiners boost purchases due to cheaper prices compared with rival palm oil, shipments of which are set to hit a five-year low, six dealers said.
Higher soyoil purchases by India, the world’s biggest importer of vegetable oils, will support global soyoil prices , which have risen 31% so far this year, but weigh on benchmark Malaysian palm oil futures.
In the 2024/25 marketing year ending in October, soyoil imports are likely to jump to 5.5 million metric tons, from 3.44 million tons a year ago, according to estimates from dealers.
Palm oil imports in the year, meanwhile, are likely to fall 13.5% from a year ago to 7.8 million metric tons, the lowest since 2019/20, dealers said. Sunflower oil imports could fall 20% to 2.8 million tons, the lowest in three years, they said.
Higher soyoil imports will lift India’s total edible oil imports in the year by 1% to 16.1 million tons, dealers estimated.
Palm oil traded at a premium for many months this year, which prompted buyers to replace it with soyoil, said B.V. Mehta, executive director of the Solvent Extractors’ Association of India.
“Soyoil was cheap and plenty in stock, so it ended up grabbing palm oil’s market share,” he said.
Crude palm oil was commanding a premium of as high as $150 per ton over crude soyoil earlier this year due to tight supplies of the tropical oil in producer countries Malaysia and Indonesia.
Indian consumers are price-sensitive and had relied on palm oil because it was cheap. But its price rally prompted even large industrial buyers to look for alternatives, said Aashish Acharya, vice president at Patanjali Foods Ltd, a leading importer of edible oils.
While soyoil was initially being bought as a substitute for palm oil, it is now also replacing rapeseed oil, which has become more expensive due to a price rally in the past two months, said a Mumbai-based dealer with a global trade house.
India buys palm oil mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia, while it typically imports soyoil and sunflower oil from Argentina, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine.
This year, however, India is likely to buy more than 600,000 tons of soyoil from Nepal, a New Delhi-based dealer said.
Soyoil shipments from Nepal are tax-free under the South Asian Free Trade Agreement, which is encouraging buyers from eastern India to source soyoil from the Himalayan country, he added.