The 2025-26 season was a good one generally for wool with prices up by 30-40% (season averages) for the AWEX MPGs across the board in Australian dollar terms, and in US dollar terms merinos up 40-50% and crossbred by up to 70%. Following on from last week’s article which looked at merino price and supply, this week Mecardo looks at crossbred price and supply.
Higher crossbred wool prices are being celebrated in many places such as the UK (British Wool article available here). In Australia crossbred wool production is the minor wool category as is shown in Figure 1. The micron distribution for Australian wool sold at auction (all breeds) in clean metric tonnes of wool along with an estimated distribution for New Zealand, based on export volumes and micron distributions for merino and non-merino wool published by the NZWTA.
The New Zealand distribution is an estimate only as it recent seasons production of wool at the coarse edge of merino and fine edge of their Medium wool (24.5 to 31.4 micron) has increased noticeably (mentioned in this December Mecardo article on the New Zealand wool clip). In developing the calculated distribution another wool category, in addition to the standard four categories (Beef and Lamb NZ article available here), a comeback category (with a fibre diameter peaking around 24 micron) was added, accounting for around 7% of the clip. The point of Figure 1 is to show that beyond 28-29 micron Australian crossbred production is minor, at best, in terms of supply. That is before quality is taken into account, a factor in which the Australian crossbred clip does poorly.
In Figure 2 the average crossbred prices by micron for the 2025-26 season (in clean Australian c/kg) is compared to the median price for the past decade (all in inflation adjusted terms). While prices at the finer end of the crossbred distribution were close to 10 year median levels, prices at the broader end were 40-50% higher, hence the joy for wool producers such as the United Kingdom.
Figure 3 compares the volume of New Zealand exports by micron category last season with the 10 year median volume of exports for these categories. Superficially supply has helped the broader micron categories with New Zealand exports of strong wool down last season by 18% on the decade median.
Figure 4 looks at crossbred price series ratios to a synthetic staple fibre price series running from 1980 for 30 micron and from the year 2000 for the UK wool indicator which correlates roughly to 35 micron. There are clear low points for the ratio, around 1.5 for 30 micron and around 1.0 (parity) for the UK series. The longer 30 micron series show the ratio falling to around the 1.5 levels five times in the past 45 years, most recently in 2023. The upside is more variable, reaching 3.5-4.0 in 2016 and 2020. The ratio for 30 micron is back to 3.0, which is relatively high by historical standards. For the UK series the ratio has lifted from an extended period around parity, to near 2.0, and is close to the high reached in 2015. The warning from Figure 4 is the long terms linkage between the 30 micron and synthetic fibre price, which has a long-term trend of increasing production and falling real price. That is not a good fibre price series to be linked to.
What does it mean?
The broader micron wool categories compete with synthetic fibres, which have long term trends of rising production and falling real prices. While price ratios are not destiny, the 30 micron and UK price have been down to their respective low ratios twice in the past two decades. Lower supply may push the ratio higher as it has been doing for broader merino, but at this stage history says crossbred prices are pushing up to high levels in comparison to the fibres they compete with.
Key Points
- Crossbred wool price rises in 2025-26 were comparable to merino
- Lower supply appears to have helped the broader edge of crossbred prices
- Crossbred price ratios to synthetic fibres have risen from the basement to relatively high levels
Click on figure to expand
Click on figure to expand
Click on figure to expand
Click on figure to expand
Data sources: AWEX, NZWTA, Beef+Lamb NZ, RBA, Emerging Textiles, The Fibre Year, ICS, Mecardo
