Epress.am News from Armenia
During the summer months, there was a drop in the price of eggs, and now those prices are simply “restored” and not rising (per se), said Lusakert Pedigree Poultry Plant LLC Executive Director Manase Yepremyan at a press conference in Yerevan today.
“We now have stable, normal, restored prices,” he said, then went on to explain why there had been a decline in the cost of eggs.
According to Yepremyan, the decline in prices was due to manufacturers who instead of eliminating the excess quantity of goods, choose to reduce prices, thus exhibiting “wrong policies.”
“If our manufacturers did this [eliminated the overstock], there wouldn’t be such great public interest today in this issue,” he said.
RA Consumers’ Association Director Armen Poghosyan, in turn, said that the cost of eggs in the summer was lowered particularly so that competitors, unable to compete, would be left out of the market.
“In economics, this is called ‘dumping’ [a kind of predatory pricing policy]; it works so that the competitor, being hit, is left out of the market,” he said.
Yepremyan advised Poghosyan to avoid using this term, since it is used in the foreign market (it is generally used in the context of international trade law). “There’s no dumping here,” he said.
The Lusakert ED also noted that the price of eggs over the New Year holidays will be around 50–60 drams each ($0.14–0.17 US). “I am officially stating: [the cost of eggs] won’t increase by a single luma [i.e. penny] on the brink of the New Year.”