Accounts for Third of Market : Finland Center for Trade of World’s Farmed Fur Skins

In the huge storerooms of the Fur Center at Vantaa near here, row after row of Finnish blue fox, mink and raccoon pelts are strung neatly together, waiting to be sold at auctions and turned into fur coats.

Finland is the world’s leading exporter of farmed fur skins, accounting for about one-third of the global market. Fur exports make up about 3% of the nation’s exports.

The 1985-86 season opened in early December with an auction that drew 120 select international fur dealers. Four more auctions will be held later this winter.

Buyers come from many parts of the world, including the United States, Canada, West Germany and the Far East.

“The group is small and we all know each other. It’s like a big family in a way,” said Matti Sulen of the Finnish fur-selling cooperative.

He said the cooperative sold furs for a total of $330 million during the previous season.

Finland’s 5,700 fur farms, most of them small family units in the northwestern part of the country, produce about 8 million pelts a year. They specialize in mink and blue fox, but also offer fitches and finnraccoons.

During the auctions, hundreds of thousands of pelts, selected according to quality, color and size, are moved to Vantaa.

Finland only recently regained its status as the auction site for the international fur market. Auctions of Finnish fur were held here during the 1950s and 1960s but were transferred to Copenhagen in 1963 because of insufficient facilities.

They came back to Finland in 1983 after the modern Vantaa center was built. A new warehouse is under construction.

Other fur auctions are held in New York, Copenhagen, London and Leningrad, but the Finnish auctions are the most important, and set price trends for the season.

The auctions last a few days, but buyers come well in advance so they have time to go through the pelts and judge their quality and color, Sulen said.

The average price of pelts since the last season has varied between $60 for a blue fox pelt to more than $100 for blue silver fox, with a record last year of $950, the highest price ever paid for a single Finnish pelt.

“Our farmers try continuously to adapt to changing fashion demands,” Sulen said. “They mutate the animals in order to get better quality and color.”

Artificial insemination to produce bizarre but beautiful cross-bred pelts had begun to take off in Finland, although farmers frowned on the more extreme market demands for such products as “pink mink” or rainbow-striped fox fur, he added.