The current sale year has seen dramatic changes. The growth of CTS Book One and the introduction of CTS Book Two for the Cape, the demise of Vintage and the Cape TBA regional sale, and a new incentive for the KZN sale made it difficult
to compare figures year-on-year. So to see how we’re doing, it seemed a good idea to combine various numbers from 2012. Let’s see what happened.
First the Majors.
The CTS January sale in the convention centre in Cape Town had about one hundred more horses sold than last year, while the traditional National Sale held in April recorded about one hundred less.
Adding these two major sales together gives very similar number for yearlings sold and not-sold. A year-on-year is not entirely true, though, because in 2012 it was decided to treat vendor buy-backs as a new item, and so fuzzed all the traditional figures from previous years. However, the new treatment should not have affected average and median prices much, and we can take these as read. The combined figures suggest that not much changed from 2011 to 2012 in this respect.
The yearlings previously sold at Vintage and the TBA’s Cape regional sale may have found a new home in the CTS Book Two sale, although the overall quality of Book Two may have been higher. Just where Book Two sourced these yearlings is hard to tell – other than that the August 2yo sale had a smaller catalogue than in previous years, so some may have come from there. That still leaves the question where the lesser yearlings disappeared to.
Book Two saw a massive increase in average and median price when compared to the Vintage/TBA combination. The median price went from 35k in 2011 to 60k in 2012.
At the time of the Book Two sale the new incentive for the KZN yearling sale was not known. Interesting to see then that the increase in KZN was almost as dramatic as the one from Book Two. The median went from 30k in in 2011 to 50k this year. The KZN sale had been in the doldrums for some time, and the incentive-injection was certainly timeous.
The August 2yo sale saw a 15% drop in horses sold, but a lesser drop in revenue. Consequently, the average price was up. Not so the median price, which weighed in at 45k, the same as in 2011. Whereas the 2yo Sale median price had been ahead of the Vintage, Cape Regional and KZN medians, it now finished third behind Book Two and KZN (45k vs 60k and 50k respectively).
Adding all sales together sees a 5% drop in horses sold, a 2% increase in gross revenue, and a much stronger middle market for 2012 judging by the median prices: colts up 30%, fillies up 14%, and the overall median up 25%.
At the time of writing, the TBA Ready To Run Sale still has to take place (in November). The sale is linked to an incentive race worth R2 million. In 2011, the median price of 95k put the sale in third place behind Book One and Nationals.
It will be interesting to see whether the similar big-race incentive for the new CTS Ready To Run sale (in December in the Cape) will affect the original version held a month earlier, and also whether the new CTS version can attain a comparable median price.
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To view Sale-by-Sale Statistical Summary click here
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