Our Value Chain
Six stages, held by one party.
A physical commodity trade passes through six distinct stages between a producing region and a destination market. Each requires different expertise, each carries different risk, and each is a point at which the trade can fail.
Allez holds all six. We contract the capacity we need — vessels, storage, inspection — rather than owning it, but we retain responsibility across the whole sequence rather than passing any part of it to the counterparty.
Six stages
01 — Origination
We buy at source, from suppliers assessed before any position is taken. Direct origin relationships determine what can be secured when supply is short.
02 — Specification and quality
Grade, packing format and quality parameters are set against the destination market before the cargo is bought, not adjusted afterwards. Independent inspection verifies quality and weight at load and at discharge.
03 — Freight
We charter and coordinate the vessel, supervise loading and discharge, and hold the operational relationship through the voyage. In many of our markets freight, not price, is the binding constraint on whether a trade can be done at all.
04 — Finance
Cargo is financed from purchase at origin through transit to settlement, structured with established banking and trade finance relationships, with exposure controlled at each stage.
05 — Documentation
The full document set is prepared and checked before presentation. Documentary precision determines whether a trade settles cleanly or becomes a dispute between two banks.
06 — Settlement
The trade closes cleanly, or it is not closed. Discrepancies are identified and resolved by us, not left for the counterparty's bank to discover.
Why we contract rather than own
Capital committed to terminals and tonnage is capital unavailable for cargo, and owned infrastructure fixes a merchant to the routes it was built to serve. Contracted capacity moves as trade flows move.
The trade-off is that a contracted chain has more interfaces than an owned one. That is exactly why we hold responsibility across all of them rather than distributing it.
Where value is created
The value in merchant trade is not the margin between purchase and sale alone. It is in the risks a competent merchant absorbs that the counterparty would otherwise carry: price movement between contract and delivery, currency exposure, freight availability and cost, quality variance, documentary rejection, and counterparty default.
A buyer paying a merchant's margin is buying the removal of those risks. Pricing them accurately and managing them properly is the whole of the discipline.