Good morning, Charlotte. Please tell us about ECRUU Sugar Week and your motivations for holding the event.
At ECRUU, we specialise in media monitoring for sugar and ethanol market participants. It’s a pretty niche business, and we’ve been struggling to find an efficient way to get people in these markets to know about our services. Over the years, we’ve been chatting with fellow market information providers, many of whom told us that they’ve been experiencing similar challenges. At the same time, our clients often ask us to recommend companies that provide market analysis.
It became pretty evident that, on the one hand, we had all these companies that provided helpful market information. On the other hand, we had the market participants who needed these services, but there was no efficient way for them to find each other.
That’s how ECRUU Sugar Week was born. We partnered with the market’s best and most prominent information providers to create a free online event where information providers showcase their expertise and participants can easily contact them.
Our objective is to help market information providers – such as ourselves – reach out to the people who need our services and vice versa, for the people who need our services to find us. Ultimately, the aim is to create an efficient and transparent way for market participants to be aware of all the services that can help them stay on top of the sugar market.
Our target audience is anyone involved in the sugar and ethanol markets, whether from near or far. Whether you want to get high-quality market insight or learn more about a particular market information provider – or both – the event is for you.
Why should people sign up?
I have four excellent reasons for people to sign up. First, it’s a unique opportunity to get high-quality content from experts who don’t usually give out free content. Second, it’s entirely online; you can attend from anywhere worldwide. Third, it’s completely free. And four, did I mention it’s free?
We are fortunate to have an excellent lineup with 18 speakers who will present over a week on both the sugar and ethanol markets. We have speakers from the International Sugar Organisation (ISO), Datagro, Green Pool, and Covrig Analytics who will give a global overview. S&P Global Commodity Insights will talk about NAFTA, and we have experts from India, Pakistan, Africa, the CIS and the EU. Marcus Weather will discuss what to look out for weather-wise, and Czarnikow will present on new fuels.
I could go on; you can see the full program is here:
You are based in India. What is happening there in the sugar world?
The sugar market is currently focusing on India. The monsoon has been excellent so far, and we’re looking at a big cane crop in 2024/25 and a probably bigger one in 2025/26. The industry is pushing hard for exports; this could be a game changer for the global S&D, which is otherwise looking balanced. However, the government’s primary focus is the ethanol program, and it wants to ensure sufficient feedstock. India is a tricky one, so we have two experts who will be discussing the subject at our event.
How do you think AI will affect your business and market analytics?
We are keeping a very close eye on AI developments. We’ve identified two main movements. On the one hand, AI has tremendous potential for scraping news and automatically summarising content, which would significantly impact our business. On the other hand, countries are legislating to protect intellectual property rights, making using AI tricky, especially for a company that commercialises its content. So, we aren’t seeing any significant changes at the moment. But as an AI expert once told me, AI won’t steal your job, but the guy using AI will!
There is a lot of talk about AI, but at the end of the day, commodities are a people business. Decades ago, people were convinced that the Internet would kill the brokers’ role, but this hasn’t happened. We’re big proponents of creating relationships among people in the sugar and ethanol markets because we know people want to do business with people, not companies.
That’s why we have a podcast. We invite people who provide information on the sugar market to share who they are, what they do and their journeys so far. Almost no one grew up wanting to work in commodities, yet most of us love what we do. It’s interesting to get to know the people behind the trade. You just wrote a whole book just about that!
You can listen to the podcast here.
You can get your free ticket to ECRUU Sugar Week here.
We also offer a Premium Ticket with added perks. I’d like to extend a special discount to your readers who can use the coupon code COMCONV. You can buy your ticket here.
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