OREANDA-NEWS. On July 29, 2014 a delegation of St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange (SPIMEX) visited the head office of the Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange (BUCE). The goal of the visit was to study BUCE's positive experience of organizing and conducting exchange auctions for timber and to discuss the exchange logistics system employed by BUCE. Thus, the members of the Russian delegation received exhaustive information about BUCE's timber trading section and participated in the actual trading process. Following the demonstration, Mikhail Temnichenko, SPIMEX Vice President, noted that the use of some of BUCE's practices could benefit the exchange trade project in Irkutsk.

The guests from St. Petersburg were also willing to discuss the matter of logistics.Specifically, in view of Russia's vast territory and the need to arrange transportation of goods purchased at the exchange, the use of exchange warehouses will enable buyers to optimize transportation costs and shorten the delivery period. In this light registration of an exchange warehouse in St.Petersburg would be perfectly reasonable.

Along with the aforementioned issues the sides also analyzed the initial results of introduction of a new futures contract for Oil products index Regular-92 calculated by SPIMEX. The first trading session with this contract was held on July 1, 2014, and already today one can say that it was well received by the market players. For example, on July 14, 2014 BUCE's derivatives market section set yet another record in terms of the total amount of contracts traded within a single trading session - 1.19 bln BYR. As could be expected, the new futures contract for Oil products index proved most popular. This attests to success of BUCE and SPIMEX joint project that will become a spring board for development of other promising areas of cooperation.