??
It is these EC prices which bemuse and befuddle the European market. Two months out of date and inclusive of every transaction, including long-term contract tonnages agreed on highly generous terms to key buyers in certain regions, these average prices make the market arguably less transparent; and certainly less content. They stand there visible but frustratingly well out of reach of almost all European market sugar buyers. And they haunt the very sellers who wrote those generous terms long ago but who are now trying to muscle the contract prices higher for 2020.
That is why we launched our Sugaronline Cash Market Prices in Europe; to try to give cash market buyers an indicative price at which they should be able to source a spot consignment for prompt delivery. While cash market spot transactions are a fraction of any total market, they are hugely important. They indicate direction of travel - are the markets tightening or loosening? As such they give buyers some help in budg- eting for any new consignments they might need to consider, and they give sellers some indication of what the market might bear.
This last point is important because the sellers have long held that they prefer the opacity of the European markets. Yet even sellers are interested in knowing which way the cash market is trending, since it can prepare them as they try to plot the prices for the next wave of contract negotiations.
But once you begin to pull back the curtain on sugar prices, you find there’s a whole world that remains to be discovered. And people are hungry for that insight. Sure, they like us for our news and reports, we have been around forever as a mainstay in the industry, after all, but the response to this new pricing service has been astounding, if not overwhelming. When we were developing the service, the idea was to provide price transparency for Europe and for Africa, focusing on key re- gions for each continent because there was little information out there to help guide sugar buyers—and give producers an idea of what they’re likely to get for their product. And then, the requests started coming in, even before we had officially launched. What about this region? Or that one? Can you get your hand on information there too?
And the answer is yes. The methodology that we’ve developed is robust, requiring proof of transactions, and taking into account twice-weekly information from reputable market participants on both the Buy and Sell side.
Where do we go from here? Podcasts seem to be the likely progression, providing more insight into the conversation with actual buyers and sellers to give the flavour of the market. More original news articles, of course, because that’s what you naturally get when people start to trust you because you’re giving them the information they need in exchange for what they’re telling you. We’re marching ahead into a whole new role in the global sugar market after two decades in the business, rocking the boat and upsetting competitors who think we should stay in “our place” (any ideas where that is?) and those who prefer to live in the shadows rather than in the light, but it’s all about being true to ourselves: provid- ing the information the global sugar industry needs to make decisions based on data.
Meghan Sapp E:
meghan@sugaronline.com
Brian Nolk E:
brian@sugaronline.com
23 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | September/October 2019
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32
