A glut in flue-cured lamina is not a glut in extraction feedstock

Every leaf headline this year has said the same thing: supply is up, prices are down. Global flue-cured production excluding China rose to around 2.204 billion kg in 2025 from 1.839 billion kg the year before. Zimbabwe's average fell to US$2.49 per kg. Indian FCV realisations fell too.

Extraction buyers reading those headlines sometimes conclude that their own feedstock must have got cheaper by the same proportion. In our experience it does not work that way, and it is worth setting out why.

Lamina and byproduct are priced on different variables

Flue-cured lamina is priced on grade: colour, position on the stalk, body, integrity of the leaf. Those are the attributes a cigarette manufacturer is buying, and they are what the auction grades describe.

Refuse, rava, dust and stems are not bought for any of that. An extraction plant is buying alkaloid, and the only question that matters is how much nicotine comes out per unit of input, net of what it costs to handle the material. A lot with poor colour and broken structure can be the better purchase.

Because the two are priced on different variables, they do not have to move together. A lamina surplus arises when more leaf is grown than manufacturers want to smoke. Byproduct availability is a function of how much leaf is actually processed, how it is threshed, and how much competing demand there is from extraction and from reconstituted sheet.

What a lamina surplus does do

There are second-order effects, and they are real. More leaf processed eventually means more byproduct generated. Soft lamina prices can make whole leaf competitive as an extraction input where it previously was not, which pulls demand in the other direction. And carry-over stock changes what is physically available in any given month.

The point is not that byproduct is immune to the cycle. It is that the relationship is indirect, and a percentage taken off a flue-cured headline is not a forecast for what you will pay for dust.

Buy on the assay

We do not publish a blanket nicotine figure for any of our grades, because a number from an earlier crop is not the material you would be paying for. Every lot is tested before dispatch and quoted against its own figure.

In a year when the published market commentary is this noisy, the comparison that decides the purchase is unchanged: alkaloid yield per rupee landed, on the lot in front of you.

Sources: Universal Corporation flue-cured production estimates, 2024 and 2025. TIMB auction data, September and October 2026.