The crusher, once one of China’s largest soybean importers, registered the bankruptcy on Friday with a court in the Shandong province, as per a filing on a website run by China's Supreme Court, reported Reuters.
Shandong Sunrise is headquartered in Rizhao, China's major crushing hub in the eastern Shandong province.
The bankruptcy follows reduced requirements for soybean meal from China’s pig industry.
Rabobank, in an industry note published in April this year, said China’s soybean crushing industry was facing overcapacity, with pork consumption on a downward trend. Consumer demand for pig meat was not keeping up with production, it added.
Meanwhile, tariff tiffs between Washington and Beijing is also encouraging farmers to switch to alternatives to soybeans for their feed rations.
Earlier this month, China's ministry of agriculture and rural affairs, as per its monthly crop report, cut its forecast for soybean imports for the 2018/19 crop year, warning that higher prices due to the country's trade war with the US would undermine demand.
The imports of soybeans in the crop year that starts on October 1 would be 93.85m tons, a reduction of 1.8m tons from June’s estimate, the ministry said.
LDC investing in Chinese soybean crushing sector
In April, we reported on how agribusiness group, Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), had completed the acquisition of an oilseeds processing facility in Tianjin, China. The deal had been agreed in November 2017 but remained subject to standard conditions.
The asset in question is Sinarmas Natural Resources Foodstuff Technology (Tianjin) Co., Ltd, which includes oilseeds crushing and refining facilities in the Lingang Economic Area within Tianjin’s Binghai New Area district.
LDC said the newly acquired processing facility has a daily soybean crushing capacity of 4,000 tons for the production of soybean meal and crude soybean oil, and a daily refining capacity of 1,200 tons for the production of refined edible vegetable oil.
Beyond the new processing plant in Tianjin, LDC operates three other similar facilities in the Hebei, Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces, supplying soybean meal to major and local feed mill groups that produce animal feed, as well as edible oils for food companies.