The CTRM Blog

This morning I spoke with Shobhit Mathur, VP Product Management & Pre-Sales, for EKA to get a catchup on their activities. EKA continue to grow and now have more than 220 staff and have recently opened a new office in Adelaide, Australia where they have had some good success recently. EKA has signed a number of new deals in the Ags and Metals side – mostly unannounced – including Boliden who selected Eka.Metals for commercial activities within its two main Business Areas: Mines and Smelters and the Gavilon Group, LLC, a global commodity management company, who selected Eka.Agriculture to support its trading and risk management operations.

Well this is an off topic post but if I have seemed a little curt and short tempered recently (at least any more than I usually am!), it’s because I am trying to quit smoking. My colleague, Patrick Reames did so recently and I recall him being very tetchy but now I sympathize with him entirely. I feel miserable. Constant headaches, very very very bad temper and impossible to concentrate for more then 2 milliseconds on anything. Everyone tells me it will be worth it in the end but I begin to seriously doubt this.

Navita have announced what looks to be a nice deal with Abu Dhabi National Energy Company PJSC (TAQA) for its gas storage facility in the Netherlands. According to the announcement, TAQA will utilise Pomax ECTRM for all front, mid and back-office activities related to gas trading and nominations at the Title Transfer Facility (TTF), the virtual trading point for natural gas in the Netherlands, and the Bergermeer Gas Storage flange.

TAQA plans to become a gas shipper with programme responsibility in early 2012 to support the execution of transactions for purposes related to Bergermeer Gas Storage operations. TAQA Gas Storage B.V, the contracting party for all Bergermeer Gas Storage operations, will not trade gas stored in Bergermeer Gas Storage for its own account.

Triple Point Technology is continuing with it’s strategy of increasing the company’s footprint via acquisition with their ongoing attempt to buy Australian mining software producer QMastor.  Triple Point’s initial unsolicited offer for the company in June was soundly rejected by the company’s board; however, a revised offer of $.31 per share (vs. $.24 initial offer) appears to be enough to win support of QMastor’s board and a solid majority of the company’s stockholders.  According to an article that appeared on the Computerworld Australia website, the total deal would be valued at $26.2M, slightly more than 2 times QMastor’s most recently reported annual review of $12.8M.  Triple Point’s offer is good until Oct. 7^th and is contingent upon them acquiring 90% of the outstanding shares (Bloomberg is reporting they have already picked-up a little over 5% of the shares via open market purchases since June).  Could we soon see CommodityXL for Mining? (Note: Though the quoted financials are expressed in Australian Dollars, the USD and AUD trade near parity.)

Recently, CommodityPoint published its research report, “Commodity Trading and Risk Management Consultants & Systems Integrators in Trading & Risk Management Market Research and Report, Part One—North America¹,” which looked at the consulting and systems integration landscape as it relates specifically to E/CTRM software in North America. One sponsor of that study was SunGard Global Services, and we recently discussed some of the report’s findings with Mr. Austin Morris, Global Managing Partner, Energy at SunGard Global services.

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