Posted on January 17th, 2024

Natural Rubber Latex (NRL) is a traded commodity priced and listed on the Malaysian Rubber Board (MRB) website, illustrating all daily, monthly, and annual NRL price fluctuations in the NRL commodity marketplace. The importance of understanding how various factors affect NRL pricing is a valuable tool that is necessary to make useful and meaningful decisions on your production planning and our NRL purchasing strategy to be able to anticipate what NRL cost levels may be during any 12-month period, or longer.

The spreadsheet attached illustrates the seasonality effect on NRL pricing as well as how unexpected, external factors may affect NRL pricing during the same period. In this instance, we have supplied an illustration of how NRL pricing was determined during the period 2019 to present. Although NRL prices reacted similarly to how they do every year through the months where the rubber trees provide higher volumes of NRL material July – January and the “wintering” months (February – June) where the trees “rest” and produce less NRL material volumes; an unexpected, external factor COVID-19, greatly accelerated NRL pricing during the period starting in 2020 and winding down in 2022. This pricing increase finally returned to where it was at the end of 2019, by the end of 2023. 

We keep close watch on a daily, weekly, and annual basis of where NRL pricing is headed or trending and use the available information from the MRB website to measure how we can stay abreast of NRL price movements. We can then safely plan our NRL Purchasing Strategy based on what we see in the present and make apt comparisons with what has happened in the past. To that end we keep an exact history of MRB-NRL pricing activities, going back several years. 

The MRB-NRL price listings are what the overseas providers charge NRL suppliers (such as AB17 Enterprises, LLC) to purchase NRL from them. From there, the NRL suppliers add on their operating costs, including any profits that may be earned in a very competitive marketplace, and sell the NRL material into the marketplace through their customer-base. Please review the spreadsheet we have supplied and please feel free to contribute any comments or questions that you may have.