Hope for market stabilization

Igor Sechin summed up the results of the first day of trading at the St. Petersburg Commodity Exchange

Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin yesterday summed up the first results of the work of the St. Petersburg Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange, which opened last Tuesday. Despite the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the fuel and energy complex in the government did not even find time to travel to the opening of the new trading platform (which is very indicative of the status of this site), the tone of his comments was generally very approving. “Today we are talking about holding preliminary auctions, technologies for uninterrupted trading are being developed,” Mr. Sechin said. At first, the exchange, the creation of which Vladimir Putin advocated, will be used only for the sale of petroleum products, which, given the high cost of gasoline and jet fuel, according to the Ministry of Economic Development, which developed its concept, should make the pricing mechanism more transparent. “Gasoline prices are already going down. Such sharp jumps are not expected. It will be good if the gasoline market stabilizes,” Mr. Sechin predicted the trend.

The St. Petersburg Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange was created in April and received a license from the Federal Financial Markets Service at the end of May. The founders of the exchange were state (or close to the state) structures - Transneft, Transnefteproduct, Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, Zarubezhneft, Surgutneftegaz, as well as Sovcomflot, Russian Railways, VTB, Sberbank and Gazprombank. The first auction took place on Tuesday. Their volumes, as expected, turned out to be insignificant: the total volume of transactions amounted to only 1.5 thousand tons worth 35.559 million rubles. A ton of aviation fuel was sold for 24.74 thousand rubles, while at Moscow airports planes are refueled at a price of 29.5 thousand rubles. per ton.

Experts are quite skeptical about the creation of the exchange. “We are ready to take part in trading on the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange, however, this depends on the conditions,” LUKOIL told Vremya Novostey. According to a company representative, it is ready to trade only in oil, and not in petroleum products. But it is unknown when such trading will begin. In addition, as LUKOIL states, the company “only needs large sales volumes - tens, hundreds of thousands of tons.” But there are no such volumes on the stock exchange yet and are not expected in the foreseeable future. That’s why oil companies are in no hurry to go to the stock exchange.

That is why Mr. Sechin was forced to say yesterday: “We will need to focus on finding ways to stimulate our suppliers. There are concrete ideas." The Deputy Prime Minister promised to familiarize Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with them. At the same time, as the Ministry of Economic Development previously stated, in order to interest oil companies, the mechanism for forming the exchange was changed: the state refused direct participation in it, and its interests began to be represented by state-owned companies, which became the founders.

But even if the government is now actively searching for suppliers, it is also necessary to think about attracting large buyers to the trading platform. “We would be interested in working with large buyers - the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Russian Railways, aviation enterprises, agricultural producers,” said LUKOIL. They announced their consent to participate in trading on the stock exchange yesterday and in TNK-BP, although the consortium found it difficult to say on what terms the company is going to do this.

In addition, Mr. Sechin yesterday praised the oil companies, which agreed to supply diesel fuel and fuel oil for power engineers at fixed prices, for their consciousness, because the government feared that a reduction in export duties could lead to an increase in prices for these types of fuel. “But oil companies formed a team approach and submitted a proposal to ensure the supply of fuel oil and diesel for the energy sector in the autumn-winter period to the Ministry of Energy,” said the Deputy Prime Minister. “Thus, this should not affect the supply of fuel to the domestic market and fuel prices.” As Mr. Sechin noted, the agreement will be valid from September 20, 2008 to March 1, 2009.

Kirill MELNIKOV