ICL-Israel Chemicals Ltd.

Mosaic (MOS) remains a painful investment for investors. The company has delivered losses of 18.7% year-to-date as of July 13.

For 2016, India’s imports of nitrogen fertilizers, which only included numbers for urea, fell 27.0% to 4.9 million metric tons.

Intrepid Potash’s (IPI) gross margin for its Potash segment swung to positive territory in 1Q17, while its Trio margins were in the negative territory.

PotashCorp’s average realized prices for phosphate fell ~15% to $423 per ton in 1Q17, as compared to $499 per ton in 1Q16.

In recent years, agricultural fertilizer companies like PotashCorp (POT), Agrium (AGU), Israel Chemicals (ICL), and CF Industries (CF) have incurred higher capital expenditures.

Overall shipments for PotashCorp’s Phosphate segment fell 6.0% in 4Q16 to 0.72 million tons, from $0.76 million tons in 4Q15.

Potash salts are the key cost of production for potash, so most producers have an integrated production.

Since phosphate rock is one of the major costs of production, companies such as Mosaic (MOS) have an integrated production process.

Potash’s selling price has been on the decline for the last few quarters and is key to the performances of potash producers (NANR).

The Phosphate segment’s shipments rose 23% to ~2.5 million tons from ~2 million tons in 3Q15—compared to guidance of 2.4 million–2.7 million tons.

Demystifying the cost curve Earlier in this series, we saw that prices of nitrogen have fallen over the years, despite its significance in crop growth and feeding the vast population. The lower prices are due to a flatter cost curve, which we’ll explain in this part. Flat cost curve In the chart above, we compare a […]

Corn prices on September 12 were 1.6% higher at $3.30 per bushel compared to $3.20 per bushel in August 2016.

The Mosaic Company (MOS), which acquired CF Industries’s (CF) phosphate business in 2014, is the largest producer of phosphate globally.

To date, the median valuation of fertilizer stocks is around 7.9x. That’s at the midpoint of the nine-year average of 8.2x.

Israel Chemicals, which shipped 0.5 million metric tons during the recent quarter, saw the largest jump in shipment growth—20% year-over-year.

Ammonia is used to make phosphate fertilizers like DAP (diammonium phosphate) and MAP (monoammonium phosphate).

Last, average MAP prices in Brazil inched up to $353 per metric ton from $352 per metric ton the previous week.

MAP (monoammonium phosphate) is the second-most used phosphate fertilizer after DAP (diammonium phosphate).

Mosaic’s Potash segment generated $2.5 billion in net sales, excluding intersegment sales, in 2015. This accounted for 28% of the company’s total net sales.

In the 2010–2011 planting season, phosphate fertilizers accounted for about 23% of total NPK fertilizers consumed globally.