Glencore does nicely out of oil price volatility

By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail
Updated: 03:37 EDT, 15 June 2011

The really good thing about Glencore being a public company is that we now know a great deal more about how it earns its gargantuan income than when it was a secretive partnership operating out of Switzerland.

What is striking about its first set of numbers is not the sharp jump of 47% in income to £794m in the first quarter, but how it is making that money.

The big winner for Glencore was its energy trading division where profits soared by 140%, boosted by the volatility in oil markets.

So while the world economy and consumers in the UK suffer the harsh effect of higher oil prices - something that the Chancellor George Osborne will refer to at the Mansion House tonight - Glencore is doing very nicely thank you.

The speculators - Glencore included - like nothing better than the volatility created by the Middle East upheavals and the Japanese earthquake.

All of this is relevant to every household in Britain. Inflation, as measured by the consumer prices index, may have been held at 4.5% last month but the outlook for energy costs is far from healthy.

Morgan Stanley has raised its estimate for fuel price rises in the coming months from 6% for gas and electricity to 10% and 16% respectively.

Tesco believes that the pressure of high petrol prices is hindering the big shop at superstores and people are returning to the high street as a fuel-saving measure.

All this is no doubt very green, but it is not doing much for consumption, the economy or inflation.

Glencore, as both a big producer of vital minerals and agriculture and a trader, has the best of all worlds. It can control production, exercise influence over the market in metals and foodstuffs and arbitrage all at the same time.

This guarantees that over any period of time it is almost always a winner and hang the end user. It is quite encouraging Nicholas Sarkozy, taking an admirably dirigiste position, is calling for the G20 to engage in much greater surveillance of the commodity markets.

In a way it was inevitable that such calls would come as the role of the big players in the market, including rivals such as Trafigura and Noble Group, become more transparent.

There is one positive sign that Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasenberg is getting the message.

Following the disclosures on these pages about Glencore's muddled tax affairs the company is pledging more information on its tax payments around the world. That is a useful start.

Royal pain

Everything looks to be shrinking at the Royal Mail except for chief executive Moya Greene's salary.

A year into the job and she is starting to wonder what kind of treacle pudding she has landed in. The universal mail is shrinking by around 5% a year but her ability to grow revenues is severely restricted by the regulatory rules governing its commercial regulations.

Green is hopeful that the shift of the regulation of the Mail from Postcomm to Ofcom will make a difference because the latter is more useful to dealing with commercial organisations.

What is clear is that the Royal Mail is still grossly over-manned, that it may need to revisit the price of the first and second class post and no progress can be made on privatisation until the European Commission gets its act together.

It must agree that if the government takes over the pension fund liabilities (which have halved to £4bn largely as a result of the switch from RPI to CPI) this does not constitute a subsidy.

That may have to wait until early next year.

So far from being the Coalition's first privatisation Royal Mail may find itself in a queue behind Northern Rock and other bank sell-offs.

Burnt apple

The tendency in some quarters, including Number 10, is to see the giants of the American tech industry Google, Apple, Facebook and the like as caped crusaders doing the very best for business and the consumer.

But there is a big downside to what they do.

In their enthusiasm for open access they believe that content, including software, is there for them to lift.

The decision of Apple to settle with Nokia, over alleged purloining of the Finnish firm's software for the iPhone, is therefore a victory for patents and copyright.

As a result of the settlement, Nokia will now receive an estimated 1%-2% of future iPhone revenues.

This may not be enough to save Nokia but it sets a precedent for other software and content providers who feel they have been cheated.