The crash in oil prices amid the coronavirus crisis allowed the transnational commodity trader Trafigura to triple its commercial profit in the last fiscal year (for the company it ended in September). In 2020, the trader made a record $ 5.3 billion in oil trading. Bloomberg reports.
Last year, the demand for oil fell by about a quarter, which led to a fall in the cost of raw materials and a shortage of storage space. In April 2020, the quotes of the American WTI dropped to negative values for the first time in history. That is, the seller actually offered to pay the buyer in addition if he took the oil. To take advantage of the market situation, Trafigura increased its tanker fleet by 70 percent in the same month. As a result, April became the busiest period in the company’s 27-year history.
In the spring, it was reported that one of the winners from negative oil prices was the British trading company BB Energy. During the fall in quotations, it had free space for storing oil, and the company bought about 250 thousand barrels of cheap WTI. In addition to BB Energy, commodity traders Glencore and Mercuria, as well as BlueKnight Energy Partners, were among the beneficiaries of the collapse.
Earlier it was reported that the owners of supertankers will have to send part of the fleet for scrap due to a decrease in demand for their services. Clarkson Research Services, a division of the world’s largest ship broker, estimates that about 2 percent of all supertankers will be scraped in 2021. In the previous two years, the figure was almost zero. An additional incentive for ship recycling is that scrap prices are currently peaking since spring 2018.