JustCommodity Spreads its Wings
We had the opportunity recently to talk to JustCommodity, a Singapore-based CTRM vendor, that has been quietly making steady progress in recent months extending its geographic and commodity reach. According to Ong Lay Kian, EVP of Operations for the company, although JustCommodity had predominantly been focused in the Edible Oils sector in Asia, in recent months it has increased its reach by moving across the asset class into other agricultural and soft commodities including Grains, Softs-Coffee, Cocoa, Sugar and Rubber and also across geographies into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “We have opened a UK office and are in the midst of opening an office in Geneva as well,” we were told recently. JustCommodity was incorporated in 2002 and provides its ContraXCentral (CxC) software product that covers trading, logistics, and risk management coupled with real-time reporting tools.
To validate its claims, Ong Lay Kian cited a number of new customers across different commodities and geographies. For example, it added Creative Group last year, a leading Ukrainian integrated agro-industrial company and one of the largest producers of agricultural products in Ukraine that produces fats and margarines, sunflower oil and meal, soybean meal and oil and biofuel pellets and is engaged in agriculture, particularly farming and livestock breeding. Last summer, JustCommodity announced that IFFCO, a United Arab Emirates based business house, which manufactures and markets a range of consumer products, had gone live with its CxC software. JustCommodity also continues to succeed in its traditional geography and commodities with a bread and butter win at Genting Plantations Berhad (“Genting Plantations”), one of the fastest growing plantation companies listed on the Main Board of Bursa Malaysia (formerly known as Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange) for palm oil.
In April this year, JustCommodity further announced that Guan Chong Berhad (GCB) had selected their CxC solution to help manage their manufacturing businesses in Malaysia, Indonesia, as well as their trading business in Singapore. GCB is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of cocoa products. It engages primarily in the manufacture and trading of cocoa-derived food ingredients and cocoa-related products in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia and offers cocoa butter, cocoa liquor (cocoa mass), cocoa cake and cocoa powder. It is also involved in purchasing and distributing cocoa-derived food ingredients, as well as in marketing and promotion activities of chocolate related products and confectionaries; and trading of cocoa beans.
We also understand that JustCommodity has recently signed the Export Trading Group, which owns and manages a vertically integrated agriculture supply chain on the African subcontinent with operations spanning procurement, processing, warehousing, distribution and merchandising. In addition to ETG’s presence in more than 30 African countries, it is actively present in North America, India, China and South East Asia.With wins and clients in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East for clients in agricultural commodities outside of edible oils, JustCommodity is indeed beginning to expand and make its presence felt. The opening of the London office and recruitment of a senior business development resource there will also mean that it will naturally compete for more business in the EMEA region that it perhaps has done in the past.
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