Singapore is where you’ll find traders in Asian oil. It also has numerous refineries, so there is a lot of storage capacity. And Singapore is on the route between the Middle East and China, the region’s largest purchaser of oil and gas. This automatically makes it a nerve centre for my activity. Furthermore, Southern Asia is a major player in both the production and the transformation of agricultural commodities and metals. For this activity in Asia, Singapore is therefore the key, despite the difficult climate.

As a matter of fact, I’m only there three quarters of the time. Most of the clients are in Singapore, but they sell everywhere across Asia. For our operations, which are structured products, you have to limit risks and therefore know every counterparty with whom you work, and notably the intermediate traders and end purchasers, whence the need to travel a lot because analysing the risks to take means having an excellent knowledge of the entire commodities flow chain.

I generally spend part of the week in Singapore and the rest on a short trip to another country in the region. People often don’t realise just how vast this geographical zone is and how many different cultures and codes there are. I’ve been doing this for a number of years now; it’s frantic but also fascinating, and always requires a high level of adaptability. For example, right now I’m just back from Auckland. 10:30 hours there and 10:30 hours back for just one day in New Zealand. It can be a little tiring, and on this trip I spent more time in the air than on the ground! But hey, I really love my job!

In a future post, I’ll talk about customer relations, something even more important in Asia than elsewhere.