UMDIS Mushroom Agency asked Boey Tze Zhou who produces mushrooms in Malaysia – to tell us about mushroom market there.

Below you find the article by Boey Tze Zhou.

The main challenges of mushroom business in Malaysia in 2023 were extreme weather, source of raw material and static mushroom farm price.

More than 95% of local mushroom growers (except foreign companies) in Malaysia are growing oyster mushroom in small scale, and nearly 100% of them are not equipped with air-conditioned grow rooms, some with evaporative cooling system and most of them are using traditional method that started 35 years ago. During draught season, the weather is too hot and dry, causing those farms with traditional method with production fall to just 10%.

The main raw material for oyster mushroom growing in Malaysia is rubber wood saw dust, which is the waste from rubber wood saw mill. With the global economic crackdown, sales of furniture industry fall significantly, causing saw mill to cut production, eventually the waste of saw mill – rubber wood saw dust fall significantly as well. Falling of raw material supply causing increment of price and eventually production cost of oyster mushroom farm.

During raining season, most oyster mushroom farms will produce a lot of mushrooms due to favourable weather and causing over supply. Therefore, it is difficult to raise the price of oyster mushroom (oyster mushroom shortage only happen for about 3-4 months every year during draught season) and the farm price of oyster mushroom was stagnant or a very small increment only for the past few years, despite huge increment in production cost due to inflation and shortage of raw materials.

In 2024, I expect a lot of low productivity oyster mushroom farm will be shut down. There are few oyster mushroom farms in Malaysia are equipped with air-conditioned grow rooms, but they are not doing well due to technology and relatively cheap price of oyster mushroom.

If the farm price of oyster mushroom is able to increase to certain level, make it worth to invest into fully air-conditioned oyster mushroom farm, I believe the entire oyster mushroom market in Malaysia and Singapore will be monopoly by that company due to consistent supply, good quality and economy of scale, and hopefully I am one of the shareholder of that company.

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