Because of today’s holiday in Iran, the PDID Office of NPC organized the rice committee yesterday March 7th. 2020, and once again surprised the converting industries and exporters. They increased the prices all the way for all materials.

This price increase has happened in a condition that the oil prices are decreasing in the world and the Covid-19 crisis has affected many businesses and price decreasing.

This week, once again the official value of the US$ was increased by 2.17% and reached to Rls. 136.333 which was accounted for the pricing formulation. Also all 3 ODTv indexes (Offering, Demand and Trading Volume) decreased dramatically (Following table):

Though such a sharp decrease in demands at the end of the Iranian year that is normally higher than other months, didn’t affected the price decision makers. So, the least result might be an intentional decision of an office that the philosophy of its existence is supporting the converting industry, to collapse the down stream industries. Why? No one can guess, or the gestures may be faced with legal charges. But the least that we can say might be existing of some hands that wants the neighbouring countries’ markets to be not competitive for Iranian producers.

The other surprising action was seen from the buyers. Although the health and hygienic authorities in Iran had prevented any gatherings however the IME organized a total of 210 bids during last week (a record after several months) out of which 179 times of trading volume was successful, though the total purchases were less than last week that there were only 159 successful tradings. This means that the purchases should have been more through converters than market brokers.

Table I below shows the new prices that this week have been ranked on the basis of the highest differences of the material prices:

Table I: New base prices applicable for (March 07th – 14th evening)

Table II: 5 tradings at one time bid at IME hall

Table III: The total trading volume for last week (March 1st-7th) at IME Hall