Today we announced CME Group’s first-ever licensing deal with a mainland China-based price and index vendor.  Mysteel is China’s leading service provider in the steel e-commerce sector.  Based in Shanghai, it has established strategic partnerships with more than 20 metallurgic bodies in China and more than 600,000 registered members and information-collecting systems covering over sixty cities across China.

With this level of penetration, it’s no surprise that Mysteel’s products are the recognized benchmarks to risk managers with price exposure to the Chinese iron and steel industries.  With China’s large influence on the resources sector continuing to drive price volatility globally, our customers with businesses associated with the Chinese steel industry are increasingly looking for the tools to manage this price risk.

In line with our history of harnessing quality benchmarks to create regionally-relevant products, it is our intention to explore ways of leveraging Mysteel’s data resources in developing risk management tools for our customers in this market.

As CME Group continues to build out its range of products for managing price risk across the steel production process, the prospect of adding innovative resources correlated to China’s growing role in the global resources sector is an exciting one.

Harriet Hunnable is the managing director of metals products at CME Group.