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DycoTrade and TFK Mercator Merger Update

On the 21st January a surprise announcement entered my email. It was from Dycotrade’s Managing Director, Mr. Ouko Reitsema regarding a merger with TKF Mercator. I was surprised on two levels by this announcement as (1) I will be honest and say that despite tracking the CTRM space for many years, TKF Mercator was a new vendor name to me and (2) the announcement came out of left field. I called Mr. Reitsema to get more information.

TFK Mercator is a German CTRM vendor that has been in business since 1988 as a company and still has an installed base of 20 customers in ags and softs. DycoTrade is of course, the Netherlands-based CTRM vendor offering a solution based on the MS Dynamix platform since 2001. Mr. Reitsema told us that he and the owner of TFK Mercator had once been colleagues and had known each other for many years. Due to health reasons, the owner had decided to find a way to retire and merging with DycoTrade was an obvious route.

The TFK Mercator software is now a little long in the tooth being based on Visual Basic but DycoTrade willtake on the support for all TFK Mercator customers, offering them all a route to its own product on special terms. Despite the product’s status, it also represents many years of accumulated experience and use and DycoTrade fully expect to add functionality to its own software and take advantage of this accumulated expertise as a result of the merger. The transaction seems to be a good deal for both vendors as well as for the customers.

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Meanwhile, Mr. Reitsema is very bullish about both DycoTrade and the market in general telling us that things are looking very good in terms of increasing its customer base in the near future.

Despite having over 80 CTRM vendors in our directory that we track and work with, we still find 2-3 new ones each year. It is simply a feature of the commodity trading business and markets that niche vendors can survive and even thrive without necessarily engaging in overt marketing. These vendors mostly are focused on specific geographies, industry segments or commodities where they often excel. For prospective buyers, this makes it hard to ensure that all options are considered beyond the handful of ‘household’ names.

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