So, now we will be talking about commodity market.
First of all let us
understand what commodity market means. A commodity market is a market that trades in the primary economic sector rather than manufactured products, such as cocoa, fruit and sugar. Primary economic sector includes agricultural products, industrial and precious metals like copper, gold, platinum etc, oil. Commodities can further be split into two broad categories: hard and soft commodities. Hard commodities include natural resources that must be mined or extracted—such as gold, oil whereas soft commodities are agricultural products or livestock—such as corn, wheat etc. Coming onto next slide, we will be seeing impact of covid 19 on commodities market. Due to outburst of covid 19, the prices of commodities stated above had a huge impact on them. The demand and as well as supply of commodities, both were affected badly. The commodity whose prices had fallen down drastically due to this pandemic situation is oil markets. The reason being heavy restrictions on travelling due to lockdown and fear, further leading to downfall in demand for oil, thus resulting in steepest one-month decline in oil prices on record. Even metal prices have fallen down but less in comparison of oil prices. Agricultural prices didn’t get that much affected but cereals, pulses, milk etc faced ups and downs in their prices,given their indirect relationship with economic activity. Thank you Sumit. I would like to conclude by saying that The current pandemic particularly stands out for the speed and magnitude of the decline in both oil prices to falling down to 40 and 50 % and further oil demand resulting from the sudden stop in activities. Coming onto metals, even they have faced reduction in prices and if the pandemic continues and the economic recession deepens, larger declines in demand and prices are possible. Thank you.