Friday, October 22, 2010

Commodities and Buyers

When I work in commodities, I deal mainly in Oil and Gold .. two very different markets and with two very different expectations so far as the buyer's are concerned.

For Oil, there are probably less than 50 or 60 real and capable buyers world wide.

On the other side of the coin, there are the Buyers whom without providing any substantive information for you to due diligence are most probably fakes. Those buyers that use this strategy,  routinely come from a generic Email address.

Recently I was approached by an exceptional contact within a large multi-national oil company with a suggestion that I offer someone he knew product.

We as a result sent them our procedures and requested further information from the buyers so we would have confidence to go to the next step, as I have the capacity either directly or indirectly to provide product for most buyers who are real.

I was astounded by the response, the suggestion was that without knowing anything about the buyer I was to take them to a tier one refinery, on someone's word only, whilst I had no problem doing this as I highly regarded the reference highly, the Tier One refinery and a major reseller are not so agreeable or flexible, and will not engage unless they know more about the buyer. The buyer's representative was not communicative, off hand, dismissive of my request and did not provide any information. Even their website was under construction with no content.

Unfortunately that left me with no option but to regard this buyer as questionable, as our due diligence had suggested that as a seller this company had failed on two previous occassions.

My contact with the major seemed to take this as a personal a front, and has broken off contact… so be it.

Stick to your procedures, nothing you can do will make an impossible deal that is outside your procedures possible, if you take a non-performing buyer to a seller mandate and they discover that you have brought them a time waster … this will reflect on you or worse still someone who is asking for POP up front with NO capacity to close and lift product, the most likely outcome being that the seller will not respond to you in the future.

I mean if I could get full POP upfront, without showing my financial credentials, why exactly would I need a buyer ?  I could take it to buyers myself.

Be careful …. so be sure.

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