Buying fibre
Spinners, traders, and anyone whose contract is priced on lint.
What you are buying, and what sets its price
You are buying lint cotton by grade and origin, or polyester staple by denier and cut length. In cotton, the specification that moves the price is staple length, micronaire, strength and colour grade, and a mill that needs 34 mm for a 60s count cannot substitute 28 mm at any price.
Four things set the cotton price at the same time. One, the world balance: how much is grown, how much the mills use, and what is left in store. Two, the futures market, and how crowded the betting on it has become. Three, what is happening in each growing country: its crop, its currency, its export rules. Four, the premium or discount on the exact grade you need.
Polyester staple is a different animal. It is made from paraxylene and mono ethylene glycol, so it tracks oil and gas and Chinese operating rates rather than weather. That is why it is the natural hedge against a cotton spike, and why it stops being one when oil is rising too.
Buying fibre, step by step
The fibre guide’s twelve steps in one sitting: the spec your counts dictate, the merchants, the one-basis comparison, the letter of credit, the tests and the claim window.
Read it instead
Buying cotton by the bale, from specification to settled claim. Twelve steps, in the order they actually run.
The count decides the cotton. A mill that needs thirty four millimetre staple for a sixty count cannot substitute twenty eight at any price.
Step one. Write the spec from your count programme: staple, micronaire, strength, grade, trash, and the tonnes.
Two. Decide which origins you can buy from: duty and quota into your country, payment rules, and the sailing time you can live with.
Three. Read the market before you ask: the futures, the world index, your origin’s local spot, the balance and the crop. Then cover now, wait, or split.
Four. Ask two to four merchants, with the spec, the quantity, the shipment spread, the term and port, and whether the price is fixed or on call.
Five. Put the offers on one basis: cents per pound into dollars per kilo at your mill gate, with duty, port, inland, finance and regain all in.
Six. Negotiate the price or the basis, the spread, the tolerance, the quality terms, the weight terms, and who arbitrates.
Seven. Sign the contract and open the letter of credit. The bank pays the merchant against the documents, which protects both sides.
Eight. Collect the shipping and classing documents: the bill of lading, the invoice, the weight list, and the certificates the contract names.
Nine. Clear customs. Raw cotton into Bangladesh, Pakistan and China is duty free or quota, not a tariff.
Ten. Weigh the lot, test the moisture, and run the fibre tests against the contract, the week it arrives.
Eleven. Claim inside the contract’s window, or accept and settle. A claim raised after the window is a claim waived.
Twelve. Record what the lot did in the mill: yield, breaks and faults per origin and merchant, so the next spec is tighter than this one.
Every step opens into detail on the guide, with the vocabulary, the published numbers and the blank spec sheet beside it. Free, and there is nothing to sign up to.
The 12 steps, in order
Each step is a short page of its own: the detail, the tools for that step and the next step one tap away at the foot.
- Step 1 of 12 Write the fibre spec from your count programme Staple, micronaire, strength, grade and trash for cotton; denier, cut length and tenacity for polyester and viscose. The tonnes decided by the counts you spin, not by what is on offer.
- Step 2 of 12 Decide which origins you can buy from Duty and quota into your country, payment rules, and the sailing time you can live with.
- Step 3 of 12 Read the market before you ask The futures, the world index, your origin’s local spot, the world balance, the crop and the positioning. Then: cover now, wait, or split.
- Step 4 of 12 Ask two to four merchants The spec, the quantity, the shipment spread, the term and port, the payment, and whether the price is fixed or on-call.
- Step 5 of 12 Put the offers on one basis Cents per pound CFR into dollars per kilo at your mill gate: duty, port, inland, finance and regain all in.
- Step 6 of 12 Negotiate Price or basis, the spread, the tolerance, the quality terms, the weight terms, and who arbitrates.
- Step 7 of 12 Sign the contract and open the letter of credit The bank pays the merchant against the documents, which is what protects both sides.
- Step 8 of 12 Collect the shipping and classing documents The bill of lading, the invoice, the weight list, and the classing certificates the contract names.
- Step 9 of 12 Clear customs Raw cotton is heading 5201, and into Bangladesh, Pakistan and China it is duty free or quota, not a tariff.
- Step 10 of 12 Weigh, test moisture, run the fibre tests Conditioned weight and an HVI test against the contract, the week the lot arrives.
- Step 11 of 12 Claim inside the limit, or accept and settle A claim raised after the contract’s window is a claim waived.
- Step 12 of 12 Record what the lot did in the mill Yield, breaks and yarn faults per origin and merchant, so the next spec is tighter than this one.
What we cannot tell you
- We do not publish mill or merchant quotations. Nothing on this site is an offer, and no number here is the price you will be given.
- We do not know your grade. A world index is an average of qualities, and the premium on the exact staple and micronaire you need can be larger than the movement in the index.
- We do not know your terms. FOB, CFR, CIF and delivered are different numbers, and so are net 30 and a letter of credit at 120 days.
- The crop data describes the United States in detail and everywhere else more coarsely, because that is what is published free.
Tools you can use
12 things you can open, type into or take away for this purchase. 5 of them are spreadsheets you keep.
Calculators
Spreadsheets with live formulas. Type your own numbers into the yellow cells and the rest computes. They arrive empty of our figures on purpose, because your conversion cost is not ours.
- Freight reckoner Excel
Turn the box rate you were actually quoted into the cents per kilogram that belongs in your costing, at the load you will really achieve.
- Cost of payment terms
Put the deposit, the days and your own borrowing rate in and read what the term costs you in interest, so two quotes on two different terms compare on one line.
Tables to look yourself up in
Tables built to be read across. Find the row that is yours and read the answer, rather than reading a general explanation and doing the translation yourself.
- Natural fibre properties
Check a claim about staple length, micronaire, tenacity or regain against the published range before it becomes a contract specification.
- Man-made fibre properties
Look up the melt temperature, regain and wet strength of a synthetic before deciding whether your blend survives the finish you want.
- Import duty on fibre and yarn
Find your tariff line and read the base United States, European and British rate, with the code each one was read at.
- Seven supplier countries, side by side
Compare Pakistan, India, China, Bangladesh and the rest on wages, power reliability, currency, cost of money and the tariff they face, each figure stamped with its own year.
- Box rate to cents per kilo
Read your quoted box rate down the side and your realistic load across the top, and take the freight cost per kilo off the grid.
Spreadsheets to download
The underlying numbers as spreadsheets, each one carrying its own explanation sheet and its source. Yours to keep, rework and attach to an internal mail.
- World cotton supply and demand Excel
The USDA balance sheet by country, so you can watch stocks tighten before a mill tells you they have.
- Commercial regain allowances Excel
Check the moisture allowance in your weight settlement clause against the one the trade actually uses. On a container it is worth real money.
- Cotton futures positioning Excel
See how much speculative money is standing behind the price before you fix against it.
- Country cost indicators Excel
Take the whole origin comparison away as a sheet, with a reference year in its own column against every figure.
Ask a person
When the answer is not published anywhere, which for a real quotation it never is. Every one of these is free to send and gets a reference number back.
- Ask for a quote
Send one specification and get quotes you can compare side by side. No fee, and a person reads every one.
Every spreadsheet here has live formulas and arrives with our own figures left out, because your conversion cost is not ours and a sheet full of somebody else's numbers is worse than an empty one. What is worth having is the shape: which lines exist, in what order, and what each one does to the total. All of them are on the downloads board as well, shelved by what you buy.
