Fire causes $20 million wool sale delay

A factory fire caused toxic smoke to billow across Melbourne's western suburbs on Thursday, and led to the wool selling centre being evacuated.

The sale of 8392 bales was scheduled for a 10am start, and if access to re-enter was granted by 2:30pm, the sale would have still gone ahead, but it wasn’t, so it was rescheduled to 10am Friday.

And according to Australian Wool Exchange (AWEX) senior market analyst Lionel Plunkett, it’s quite unprecedented to see a wool sale on a Friday.

“The last sale we had on a Friday was in Tasmania, at Launceston, in 2010, as a trial, and in 2009 for the same reason before that,” Mr Plunkett said.

“It was to allow for sales in Melbourne on a Tuesday and a Wednesday, and then a travel day on the Thursday before the sale on Friday.”

Before that, there was a sale on a Friday in September 2001, where delays occurred at wool selling centres because of the 9/11 attacks.

He said the biggest impact of the rescheduling has been to backend systems for buyers, brokers, and even AWEX in keying in its data.

Endeavour Wool Exports trading manager Josh Lamb said the biggest impact to exports would be potential delays in shipments, given wool was unable to be picked up from the woolstores on Thursday.

But Mr Lamb said it wouldn’t cause too much of a disruption, as they will be able to catch up on Friday.

He said thankfully it occurred at what was a quiet time of year, so it wasn’t as inconvenient as it could have been.

Fox & Lillie trader Jack Lillie said the delay gave them less time to export, meaning they’ll be playing catch up next week.

“It just puts a strain on next week, and has been a bit harder to manage because money is tighter,” Mr Lillie said.

He said there are concerns some buyers are unable to make it to the Friday sale for logistic reasons, so it would be interesting to see what sort of an impact it has on prices.