i’m always on the hunt for knowledgeable scrap people i was lucky enough to get introduced to nathan fructor of idoru trading we operate in very different arenas of the scrap industry but i thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the history of the export scrap industry here in the u.s nathan is a scrap guy through and through and i have a feeling you will enjoy this podcast all right everybody welcome to another episode of uh scrap live podcast a few uh weeks ago maybe about probably about a month ago now i reached out on linkedin i said hey i’m always interested in talking to scrap people people that scrap industries in their blood they’ve been doing it i mean they love it like i love it and i basically kind of was asking for suggestions and just kind of uh put it out there for people to offer up anybody they knew that that they would like to hear more from or that they they thought was a you know a big influence in the scrap industry mr nathan uh fructor got his name got thrown about and uh so i reached out with him

luckily enough he’s super knowledgeable about the industry and i’m i’m feeling pretty blessed that i get to sit down and pick his brain so nathan fructor with iduro trading thank you for taking the time on this nice uh sunday evening and i couldn’t be happier man just to get to get your two cents on the scrap industry you’re more than welcome it’s uh nice to be here you know the the only reason you got my name thrown in there is because the guy who suggested it in brazil happened to have been on the phone with me the day that you put that request out and he just threw it out it’s just your questions yeah your timing was right let’s put it that way hey so that’s that is that isn’t that amazing you know timing in life is kind of what makes things happen you know and i would you know you and i after much discussions about um you know your history your career um there’s so many things in life that we’re because of timing i think that probably puts you in the position that you’re in today what world events

and whatnot so i’m super excited for you to kind of give us a little bit of a background on just your history in the industry and how timing really has played a role in that one of one of the first lines my mentor and boss taught me when i started was timing is everything that was like one of the first lines i picked up and it’s very very true you know timing is always very important yeah so give me where where did you start how did how did you find your way into this crazy uh this scrap metal recycling industry so i grew i grew up actually in antwerp in belgium and i had a cousin who was had was working for phillip brothers in the steel departments in brussels and i would hear always just stories of business buying selling contracts negotiating traveling around the world and that sounded pretty much like i thought i wanted to do but in order to do that i had to go to college or university and then get a degree and then wait make my way around that way and sure enough when i was 18

i moved to new york i was actually american born and i moved to new york and i i ended up going to college in new york i went to yeshiva university and as i was getting towards the end close to graduating i was looking at job possibilities and things like that and starting to interview and my i really wanted to get in either the phillip brothers or to mark rich and philip brothers was already slowly having a lot of changes uh mark rich had its own share of problems but somehow i met someone i had i had a a quick stint at another smaller trading company just to get my feet wet in basic trading or operations really and um one of the staff members that i met there uh left to go rejoin her boss at smarkridge and she called me the date after she left she says my boss is looking for a new guy why don’t you come up for an interview i think you s you you fit the bill there so i went up to walk down to fifth avenue to the mark rich officers and um she was

his secretary so she brought me into his office and i met him and the minute i walked this this guy’s name was alder goldstein’s my my boston guy who hired me and put me into this business and my mentor for many years and i just knew when i sat down in the seat opposite him and the conversation started i knew i got this job i have it i’m getting this and it didn’t matter to me at the time what he was going to pay me whether he got to pay me 20 000 salary or 18 or 22 it was irrelevant i knew i was going to get this job and so it was i um you get it real quick get it because you really wanted it or get it just because you felt like you hit it off really well with uh arthur uh our altar was just this exceptionally nice man had a lot of patience and he had a great sense of humor and you know sometimes when you you meet someone for the first time it clicks right away you have a some type of the dialogue just flows yeah

that’s what i experienced when i sat in his office and by the way before i went down on the interview he was ex-phillip brothers and before i went on the interview i asked for philip brother traders if they knew ultra goldstein and they said yeah we know him and the answers i got was he’s a great guy he’s a superman um if he offers you a job take it don’t be concerned how much he offers you great guy to work for those are the four lines i heard and i just sensed the minute i walked in there i’m going to take the job with this guy and so it was i mean he explained to me the job i was going to come in i knew nothing about scraps i knew a little bit about trucking already and warehousing because i’ve worked a little bit on some nickel but um he explained he says look you’re going to start from the bottom up we’re going to teach you operations you’ll be busy working on documents and letters of credits and booking freights and you know helping really booking freights not booking the freights

itself documents was a very very big thing um in those days none of it was electronic it was all typed up documents basically you learn the different qualities what is the difference between hms one and two at the time it was hms125050 wasn’t even 80 20 and then hm is number one and pns i couldn’t get the difference i just couldn’t get the difference yeah um so i had one interview it went well and he said look give me a few days i need to speak to management uh figure out what i can offer you i said that’s great no problem and then a few days later he called me said look okay the job this is what i got you twenty seven thousand dollars and i was over over the moon i was making twenty thousand at the first place and i was over the moon and i said great um you know covering this shake your hand and we’re gonna do this and he said you go back resign like i mentioned you know give him two weeks notice and i was out in 10 minutes already can i ask you a

question so one of the things that really intrigued me and i mentioned this to you when we very first talked is i had read the book king of oil with what was mark rich and i just i love that book because mark rich was a self-made man um i got um jacob ronstein is who gave me that book um as a president he said you really need to read this book and i just really liked um how he went about his business i mean at least from the book i mean and so when i when i saw on your uh on your profile that you at one point had worked for mark richard poe right i i i was thinking about arthur goldstein and he came from phillips brothers correct yeah although that phillip brothers wasn’t mark rich didn’t he start at phillips brothers and then went and started his own company right that’s right mark rich that’s right he started phillip brothers in the telex room and worked his way up and that’s in around 1974 75 that’s when he split he left and he set up mark richard carr so did

he work side by side arthur uh goldstein or did they work together at phillips brothers at phillip brothers they did not work together okay but ultra was in at some time he was in the pittsburgh office at phillip brothers he was doing federal alloys and concentrates and uh then at some point he hooked up with mark rich and he said look why don’t we do a scrap department there was a company at the time called luria brothers okay and you’re probably too young to remember them but many elderly guys in the industry would remember coming called gloria brothers there was a traitor there by the name of richard schwartz and he and alter hooked up and they set up a first craft trading division at mark rich and this goes back now to around 1976 77ish or so okay um they got a guy in by the name of bill allen who was this devout irish irish catholic unbelievable amazing person i’ve never seen such such an amazing person and he was running the operations doing the chartering and documentation and and an assistant or secretary came in and that was disrupting how it

started really um and you know we’ll get to the history of how scrap moved in those days later on this conversation but that’s really how i started so he hired me so i you know i started i like it was like i think tuesday or wednesday i got the job he says look go take a few days off um um monday morning you start and say you know what why don’t you go to belgium to see your parents for the weekend because you may not see them for six months because you know when i’m on a vacation i thought that’s a great idea so i booked a ticket and i was living in the city actually i flew the belgium on wednesday night see my parents was there for the weekend sunday morning i flew back and then monday morning i went to work and that office was located where it was located at a corner of 52nd and 5th avenue at the time it was called the prj building at the time the swiss watchmaker piaget was occupying that building okay and it was on the corner um great location like close to

rockefeller center i remember i was living on the upper west side on 72nd street and i was able to walk to work like a 45 minute stroll to work when it was decent weather um so that was really really great but um so i started in the operations department and then two three days into the job the operations manager said to me we’re loading a ship in new haven tomorrow a ship with turnings for spain why don’t you get on the train tomorrow morning early from uh penn state from grand central and take the train to new haven i’ll pick you up at the train station and you spend the day with me on the dock looking at the qualities i’ll show you what scrap is that’s great no problem yeah i had no idea what to expect that day so i i didn’t even know what to wear what was appropriate luckily it was a nice day but it was still was actually um february and i wore jeans and basketball shoes i mean i i know what to wear sweatshirts and jackets gloves or whatever hats got on like a 6 15

train at grand central bill picked me up two hours later in new haven went to the scrap terminal and there is this mountain mountain of turnings and i looked at it that says this is scraps yeah it looks like it’s like getting cutting fluid all over the really great bill walked me over to the pile and he took you know he stuck his hand into the pile of turnings and showed me what turnings is and gave me an example how it’s how do you get to turnings is basically when you produce screws or shower or other type of metal products you end up with these turnings and he gave me this whole lesson about it can burn it’s combustible you got to be careful can get wet and so on and so on this is great and i walked around the pile and he hands me one of these yellow notes pads and a pen it says okay i want you to draw the shape of this pose it was 20 000 tons lying on the dock so i need to draw the the the pile and how high it is if it goes

up like this and down just draw it how it’s drawn and then i want you to measure the temperature you have to be a thermometer about this big because i want you to measure the temperature of the turnings every five foot apart around the whole pile the outside of the whole pile at eye level basically and when you’re done with that come see me so i i go you know i’m like stick the thermometer in measure the temperatures and mark my spot and write down and then count five foot another one and i did this about an hour and a half whatever it took yeah they came back just this is great looks good now i want you to climb the pile you’re gonna measure the temperatures at the top so there i was climbing the pile and um measuring the temperature doing the same exercise basically and i remember i had pieces of turnings had gone into my shoes i was like itching me whatever anyway the day was exhausting it was really very tiring day he ended up driving back to the city at four o’clock so he drove me back uh

to the city to the office and um we woke up to the office all dirty but it didn’t matter and he says to my boss although we’ve broken in our virgin you know his family is scrappy you know he know he’s doing something today and that’s how we first started your first book your first book cargo it really was and uh it was a very interesting experience and that’s how i really got into the scrap business i started so for about um four or five years i was working on letters of credit contracts filing everything helping out calculations instructions paying bills etc and it was a very intense program and the idea already was made clear to me then that you know you learn all the bottom layers of the opera of the commodity that you’re going to handle says as a trader you won’t issue documents and you won’t review letters of credits and you won’t do any of these things you’ll just buy and sell and the operational staff will do it all but in order to be a trader who understands what you’re doing and knows how to tackle problems and

how to address issues when they come up you need to have all the layers and experience so that’s what i really did i did documents and then and that’s how you learn from experience basically and then um there was an opportunity in 1987 that came up for me to go into the oil department at markridge and um the office then had relocated to stanford connecticut and um you know it was the up-and-coming department every young guy wanted to grow and all that you know it was an opportunity i’ll give it a try yeah i hated it i couldn’t stand that it was a very big department i was like like 100 people in that department between operations and charters and traders and there’s way too much going on i wasn’t comfortable there i was used to a small department with seven five six or seven people very personal and at some point i wanted that job back i couldn’t get it back anymore because yeah i had introduced a childhood friend of mine from belgium who also spoke all these languages which is one of the reasons also why he liked me

he wanted me for the job because he knew he would need someone who speaks french and german and other languages and um i couldn’t get that job back but he said to me if you’re patient we’re planning on expanding in europe you are european you know you’ll uh you can move to london and you’ll sort of help set up the scrap division over there i really wanted to stay in new york but you know what i wasn’t going to give up an opportunity to leave the company the staying with the company worldwide meant more to me at the time and you know i said okay i’ll resign myself to that and while i was waiting it out a few weeks negotiation started in turn off one day i get a call and although says okay nate you’re good to go um you can start in london monday morning or so nice talking about did you move did you move to london from there yes so i left new york and i moved to london um in april of 1988 and there was a small scrap department in london at the time uh there was

one trader there and um the way the business ran in those days really is a lot of background like it was very different than it’s today today when you’re looking at bulk carbons and by the way whatever we’re discussing right now is strictly only bulk containers didn’t exist so i’m not going to focus on that right now scrap business is a bulk commodity no matter how you slice it and dice it well that’s one of the things not to cut you off but that’s one of the things i really was excited to talk to you about is because there’s individuals like myself i mean we you know we we operate in idaho and in eastern oregon so we’re very uh inland so bulk cargoes for us is never something that has ever even crossed our our mind it’s it’s you know we’re selling to shredders domestic shredder domestic steel mills and we do ship some containers of non-ferrous um export but realistically that was one of the reasons why i was excited to have these conversations is because you have that bulk background you know i’m sitting there looking at your screen and

you have that ship in the background that picture right we used to have a very similar bulk cargo ship on our wall and we were partners with schnitzer and it was loading out of the tacoma washington facility and um and so i i’m very intrigued by the bulk side of the business because i don’t know a lot about it and that’s that that is your wheelhouse correct so i’ll give you a bit of background how this worked in those days in those days first of all the landscape was very very different scrap was exported in bulk out of the great lakes there were exporters in in the great lakes area in in detroit in muskegon in places like that where bulk was exported and then you pick up cargo montreal or quebec and so on and of course the great lakes would close during the winter months from december 15th to march something but other days and there was a lot of turnings coming out of there and on the west coast you basically had schnitzer which was a very well established company there was another company called tayuka and there was hugo new

on the west coast and that was pretty much it there were no sims wasn’t even at the time on the west coast and on the east coast you had uh in canada you had the aim and um um you were back met with qmr at the time hamland they don’t exist anymore they were really swallowed up by iim and you had um several smaller one family type of exporters that had docks and they ran anywhere from boston to maine to albany also down to florida it was export dark in florida we’d be exporting from um in virginia you’d have an exporter and those guys the way they were set up is they were selling their scrap in two traders none of those guys none of them exported bulk directly with the exception of schnitzel steel was selling their bulk cargos directly to japan at the time japan was importing and they were doing some exports directly also to korea they had an office in korea another angel the schnitzer office in korea that was their business but any other cargos that went from schnitzer to malaysia indonesia uh vietnam india wherever else was usually

bought by uh by mark rich i remember also had a very good relationship with the owners of schnitzer at the time um and we were buying cargo from them on the dark we’d pay them we’d buy fobst we charge the ship and we take the cargo out so why why would why was schnitzer the only one at the time that was selling direct when everybody else had them i i get to that on the east coast you had a similar scenario there was a company called hugo new and they also were sophisticated enough and they were exporting directly also uh to the exports they weren’t really selling to traders or maybe they were i’m not sure but um they also had direct export but everybody else what was they did number one they didn’t have the sophistication that these trading companies had like philip brothers and mark rich they didn’t have field offices all over the world where the staffs the local traders and staff had their finger on the pulse of the requirements for the local steel mills um they didn’t have the know-how how to charter a ship they didn’t have

to know how to even deal with a letter of credit and prepare documents with lc make documents that have to be lc compliant so for them at the time it was easy to just sell the cargo fobst take it and pay me and we’re done and if you’re late a month shipping then pay me a dollar per ton storage to keeping the car on the dock and sometimes as a trader when you would take it you’d see the market is going up you would pay that dollar for something glad even two dollars for another month to sit on it and that’s what really happened so and the same thing was on the east coast this is how iran on the east coast they were selling to traders and the traders at the time were really mark rich was a big trader tyson solenberg did some as well um i think there was some maybe a handful of one or two other big trades but it was mostly really uh mark rich and glencore eventually who handled most of it as traders i don’t remember don’t forget we never had any scrap processing facilities strictly

trading and by the way in europe it’s the same scenario so uh in europe guys like for the emr didn’t exist was called shepherds and there were many other uk recyclers that over the years were taken over into the emr group or into sims but there were many other independent across the uk newcastle liverpool um avonmouth and other places and again they sold their cargos to traders and then the traders like mark rich glencore sold them on and what happened over the years is in those days buyers would always send one of their representatives from the mill to the dock to supervise the loading yes there was an independent surveyor who would attend to the ship and the quality but there was obvious representative from the mill that would come to inspect and to look at the at the goods and you know business cards were exchanged and eventually the world got smaller and you know from communicating with telexes we went to communicating uh via email and faxes and other things like that and also the reporting of the businesses became smaller and at some point when going into the late 90s already

it got to the point where many of the traders were being pushed out and more and more direct business started to take place for example i remember not to cut you off real quick but so when you say direct business so the actual processors the guys with the shredders and the shares and the they decided that they they didn’t need the traders or the trading houses in the middle correct they could just basically go go direct correct they they would hire a person who worked at a bank who was handling letters of credit and who now knew how to prepare documents to make mlc compliant and they would seek out a good freight broker and say hey is the first time we’re traveling a ship can you hold that hand we’ll pay you an extra dollar commission or so and that’s how they slowly learned the business and then that’s just how how it evolved they got to a point where a company like glencore would say they didn’t really want to keep the scrap department because it wasn’t really fitting the image anymore so much had changed over the years but when i

got to london so we were busy buying carvers so then i you know i started to focus on the european business a lot of we were buying a lot of uk cargos and cargos in mostly in rotterdam what year what year is this of course this starts 1988 around 1988 um we were busy with that and then our mission was really to set up our own transshipments terminal to go downstream and to really kick up the volume and what we did is so a transmitment tournament is what you see behind me it’s a dark that you rent from a stevedoring company or from the port they give you the storage area the land they give you the cranes and the way it works is you have a contract with them you buy scrap delivered to the terminal by either truck or train but we didn’t have any trains there so it’s like truck or barge or coaster and in this case in rotterdam it came from anywhere from uk belgium germany france holland denmark norway and sweden all by trump you know all these came by uh coaster and by barge okay and by

truck it would come from the netherlands germany and france anybody inland anybody inland was bringing from germa from germany since they’re on the rhine river system or so they would come by barge so we basically had a contract with the stevedore so you figure out a contract there’s a fifa ton to dump trucks into the stockpile there’s a fifa ton to discharge barges like you see the coaster the barge alongside into the stock or from the barge directly into the ship if you look at the top of it there are two bridge cranes in that picture and one bridge crane we were loading simultaneously so one bridge crane would load from the dark onto the ship the other bridge crane would load from the barges alongside the ship into the ship that way we were doing close to 15 000 tons load rates per day you’d knock a 30 000 ship out in less than just about two days basically so there were different tariffs and structures and we knew this is the fob price we sell at so this is the for the cfr price minus the freight um this is what it

would cost from board’s boards this is what costs a double handling through a dock then into the ship and that’s how every day we had our prices in those days though the euro didn’t exist so we were busy buying scrap from germany and deutsche marks and scrap from the uk and sterling and from every country in its own native currency so we were we had to hedge every position had to be ahead so if you bought 1000 tons at let’s say 300 deutsche marks we had to buy 300 000 deutsche marks for value about a month forward from now and have that in position and whenever we paid for that material you adjusted the date i mean you sold off the the position and you bought it spot but the difference sort of still gave you the protection on the currency and the rule was that margaret she weren’t allowed to go home at night without covering your position so there’s no risk-taking or nothing there’s so many i i hear this and there’s so many moving parts right i mean from when you talk you’re talking from currencies to i mean to

your unloading barges onto the ship you have you know your crane and and then i’m sure you have uh you know the guys working the docks and there’s just there’s so many um which what are they called uh the individuals that are actually running the cranes and doing all the work well does the foreman and there are the the stevedore workers and were those guys all union at that time as well or this was very lucky so okay so i’ll give you some background this so our first target was obviously rather than rather than was the main exporting hub for scrap in the in the 80s the problem was that as like in california there’s a shortage of docks way to load ships and scrap is has been viewed for so many years as a dirty commodity nobody really wants it um but that’s a different subject but yeah but we couldn’t find a doc as luck would have it um the guy i was assisting with in london the other trader came across a floating storage facility it was a ship that was a 35 000 ton deadweight ship she was anchored in

the middle of the harbor in rotterdam not even at any dock in the middle of the harbor somewhere anchored attached to the ground and she didn’t move she wasn’t even sea worthy to sail but she was storage worthy so we worked out and deal with the owners that that would be our call it floating storage facility so now technically if the ship was a 35 000 on deadweight we had about a 29 30 000 ton storage facility again it wasn’t ideal because you had to separate you know hms and shredded and so on but hey it was something it was still something and because rotterdam was one of the first ports in the world to have floating cranes the stevedore and the osteodox owned them they would push the floating cranes to the ship whenever we would be loading a ship so you had just a floating storage in the middle the ship was called the bulk cats okay you get the broadcast in the middle next to her you would get a floating crane and next to that you would get our ocean going vessel that we had chartered and the floating crane

would load from our storage facility into the ocean ship and have a similar scenario on the other side of our ocean ship but it was another floating crane emptying from barges into the ship now again it wasn’t ideal and it was a bit of a draft survey nightmare because you know you buy 30 000 tons you put it into your floating storage facility it’s all measured by draft survey not by scale now you’re loading from a barge into a ship and from the stock into a ship and then you need to figure out okay the draft survey of the ship the found draft survey so much the three four barges we discharged was so much that minus that is this so that means the difference came out of our floating storage facility but when you clean out that floating storage facility six months later you have shortages there was always about 800 to 1200 tons that went lost somewhere but that was part of the nature of the commodity and that’s how we operated for the first six months and then one day we came across a terminal in amsterdam which is called oba

and they had a massive um they had a massive uh storage area and um it’s a massive storage they were handling coal and i remember other products and we went there we looked at a contract and said this is it and they gave us a massive area there was access for the trucks to come right in and dump their trucks and maneuver and back up without uh building and there was there wasn’t the limit there was no limitation how high we could pile up the stocks they were very kind to build walls for us so that the past could lean on the walls and stack them even higher and same scenario as you see above this is not amsterdam this is antwerp this is later a similar scenario bridge cranes that moved up and down the the dark and sideways and front and back and we were loading from ships and we started to load there in 1991 we started with amsterdam and by 1993 we had outgrown it we were already busting at the girls doing more than a million tons per year and that’s that when you went to antwerp so that’s

well in 1994 uh we needed to expand we couldn’t just stick with amsterdam what happened was many of the supplies so you have the river system it’s called the ara ara amsterdam rotterdam antwerp and they’re in above each other not familiar with the river system and many of the supplies in the netherlands belgium and north of france and in bidding germany can easily go to any of these three destinations at the same freight rate or give or take a dollar or two more and what would happen is we would buy scrap to options rather than amsterdam eventually antwerp and then we would always declare when they’re ready to start loading where we want it so we were essence managing so we gave up the bulk cast in rotterdam we moved to amsterdam we only had amsterdam from 1991 to 1994 and 94 we expanded to antwerp and we now had strategically amsterdam and antwerp those were two points okay you see over here that is an antwerp actually so you kept after them we kept amsterdam because we needed it we had more tonnage and all that and um we ran with these two

terminals till 1999 but in the interim in 1992 we started to develop exports out of poland we came across contacts in poland that were able to help us export collect scrap in poland there was all ex-communist uh areas there was a lot of good railway scrap that was coming out of there and so we started the export from there as well and as time went by eventually we also with the help of a local company in ukraine managed to export scrap out of ukraine and um in those years in those years what countries were you primarily exporting to was there a top one two three countries that most of that material was going to yes we’re getting to that we’ll we’ll get to that when i saw some of the the schedule so yeah we’ll get to that so that is and then we also shipped from far east russia um so anyway so this is how it really ran in those days now the main markets um in those days if you’re looking at the 80s for example believe it or not india and korea with the two main scrap buying markets

in asia and turkey also and also spain was buying a lot of scrap for even from the united states bulk ships of 20 25 000 tons were going to spain so i figured india korea spain and turkey were like the top buyers uh of scrap but the map of what ships some way to where changed over the years so at some point once we had these two terminals amsterdam and antwerp an opportunity came along to hook up with a recycler based in rotterdam and we decided to join up with him as well and we handled some of his tonnage as well but then in 1999 that all came to an end when i sort of we left lancor and you know said i saw moved back to the states and you know started from in the states so um if you look at the major influential markets in the past i think india was a major major market people don’t even realize it i was reading recently an article that’s how the the new frontier the big market up and coming markets india it’s exactly it’s a it’s a comeback for these models already

by the way so it’s like he was a big consumer then and it took some time off and now it’s becoming a big consumer again it was a very big one it was all public tenders in those days there was no negotiating private companies there was a government entity that was negotiating all the scrap purchases for all the mills and distributing allocating 500 tons of this guy a thousand tons of this guy you would have some ships that would go out with 35 bills of ladings and sets of documents because there were 35 recipients of scrap on these ships it was a nightmare the paperwork was beyond i remember there were times we had to spend all-nighters in the office finishing off the paperwork and bundling the kind there were so many papers we had to someone from the mailroom had to go to the supermarket down the block grab one of the cards come up to the office load them take them to the bank and then take the supermarket card back um that’s how much paperwork that was involved at the time with that um so um but there’s been a

lot of changes uh over the years that was gonna be kind of like my next my next thing was just just you know i i want to know like you know because you’ve been doing it for so long i mean what are the what are the major changes that you’ve seen over the years and in that in the bulk shipping side i mean how has the market really changed from when you first started in the late 70s to today so many changes have so one change i already described to you early on how the recyclers were selling via traders and over the 80s and the 90s it sort of shifted where they started to sell directly to the steelers sort of cutting out the traders um so that was one major change that took place another change that took place and that is really as a result of the economies in every country so you know in the 70s and 80s india and korea were massive importers of ferrous crap india would have a car there was a government entity called the mstc stands for metal scrap trade corporation and there were 50 or

60 different small steemos in india and they would apply to metal scrap to mstc saying we need 500 tons next month we need 600 tons and mstc would get from all the females in all the different cities how much scrap they need so they would issue a tender they need thirty thousand tons ship to mumbai which at the time was still called bombay twenty thousand tons to madras twenty thousand tons to visak two times twenty thousand tons to chennai so they have tenders for five six cargos there’s a public tender you have to submit for your office in india you have to submit offers terms prices with discharge support you’re offering and then the bidding would start and you know the okay will bid you three dollars below and that’s how it’s an interesting factor for that also was in those days all these deals were transacted in swiss ranks not in u.s dollars the uh at the time because the indians were all buying 183 terms every lc you got from india was 180 day terms so whatever price you would put on let’s say you said your price was 350 a

ton site payment to mumbai um you would go to your bank you would say to your bank okay what are you going to charge me for 180 day documents and if i’m going to say okay it’s another 11 dollars per ton so then your price became 361 dollars a ton and what would happen is once the documents were negotiated clean we would discount the documents and get paid 350 a ton and the bank would keep the documents sit on them for six months and then get paid 361 dollars a time that’s how that went and the reason it was in swiss francs was because they needed extended credit 180 days and the interest rate for swiss francs in those days was much lower than the interest rates in u.s dollars that’s one and the other important point right now that’s probably changed a lot now that our interest rate is so low yeah correct but that was the main factor and then the other factor was that the czechoslovakian government who is technically still communist control had some kind of money clearing system with the swiss and with the indians and because of

that money clearance it worked well to run it for them for the indians and swiss francs that’s how it was done but the main reason really was the interest rate was lower in swiss ranks and that’s how those businesses were done in swiss francs at the time korean business all this container business to korea that didn’t even exist they were buying cargos and by the way the indian cargoes were all going from the us east coast west coast as well as from europe to india um korean cargos were going from west coast and east coast and europe all to india today you’re not going to find the european current goes to korea it doesn’t exist those days it was and um taiwan was buying bulk cargo some from europe some from the united states turkey of course was all bulk um but the turkey would never be containers always bulk yeah um spain would get congress from europe as well and then we’d have the occasion of cargo to brazil to mexico um you’d get a car with it to malaysia indonesia even to singapore singapore was buying bulk cargos at the time 20

25 000 tunners um thailand vietnam was not really on the map yet they weren’t buying anything yet vietnam bangladesh was already buying pakistan was buying pakistan was buying a lot of uk scrap somehow the freight rates worked well um and that’s how that landscape was in bulk until about 2000. i was going to say what year did the container freight start um playing a bigger role for ferris for on the ferris side um we looked at each other like in the late 90s you know we saw when you get the ship scrapping and scrapping containers and look at this what are you crazy no one should spurs in containers and i really think i mean credit here should go probably to i think an indian trader who had a lot of guts probably deserves the oscar for inventing this ferrous gaming containers and um what really happened is they started to load containers with scrap this was around 1999 i would say and there was an enormous amount of damages to containers these container loaders didn’t even exist yet and they didn’t know how to load them properly but it worked what happens also

the freight rates got very expensive for bulk and prices went up and all of a sudden steemos needed to commit to 30 000 cargo at a higher price and at a high freight rate and such a massive kind of would tie up 10 12 million dollars of their funds whereas with containers they would just buy two three thousand tons at a pop and they wouldn’t tie up so much money they would continue to buy and many of them weren’t even paying by letters of credit they were just paying up on departure so there was no funds tied up so that worked well for them but one of the biggest changes in my opinion the the two many changes that we’ve seen in the industry here in my opinion was uh the fall of communism the fact that the russia the iron curtain came down and also all the scraps started to come out of the baltics all the ex-communist countries ukraine russia far east russia um that really changed the map of supply where crop went and the fact the container business was a big change because until the container business you basically

had you know the united states was exporting scrap and you had the uk netherlands belgium holland i mean hound uh scandinavia and south africa a bit in a bit of australia that was it at the minute the container business started all of a sudden you had 20 new sources of scrap countries of scrap with a dozen sources in every country because every caribbean island started to export haiti jamaica puerto rico panama costa rica belize nicaragua ad nauseam all of them all the central south american countries exporting chile um mexico so did that did that open up opportunities for the traders like yourself like all of a sudden you were just only dealing with very limited amounts of people that are actually loadable cargo or receivable cargo and now the container business i would have to assume this is just my ignorance but i would have to assume that that just now added i mean a crazy amount of potential customers consumers processors sellers to the to the industry that that never existed for a trader before it did i will give you a map i know when you post this this thing i will

give you a map of what the scrap supply was like till about 1999 from bulk how it changed really in over a year how with all these countries came in then also if you look at the african continent every country that is not landlocked north africa west africa east africa all of them became exporters and all of a sudden so many different markets start cutting back on buying bulk and you start buying containers which is a perfect example was korea korea who would buy five six bulk cargos a month between posco don cook hyundai semi steel and other meals that don’t exist that were absorbed by others also okay went in containers and the indians did the same thing and so on and all of a sudden less bulk was moving taiwan practically didn’t buy any more um bulk it was all containers and that’s that was a big game changer and like you said while traders like myself um sort of got pushed out of the bulk business i mean again the occasional ball cargo still comes up as a trader but as a regular day-to-day business where you’re running 100

ships on training a year that doesn’t exist anymore and so but the container business became a thing and that’s how i got started really in the container business in about 19 about 2000 2001 got into the container business and i think that’s probably i mean to me it’s i always i mean i always say that there’s always there’s always it goes in waves right like there’s a time when bulk is big and all of a sudden you get pushed out as a trader but if you just keep working your business and your consumers and your customers and your suppliers and you just stay in the game even though the dynamics will change well then all of a sudden containers come around and if you were able to live through and stay in business through the the transition of of the bulk going you know direct also now because you are a trader and you use kept contacts you kept relationships also now you’re back in the game in a big way thanks to the container business because you have the consumers you have the the processes the processors and the loaders and um so

you you kind of get pushed back to the front of the line again and you become a needed you know an important piece of the of the export puzzle correct and um so i guess these are the two main changes that i saw happening um and also uh i’d say china like around 1995 or so opening up i remember being at a conference at the bir in oslo i think was 1995 and every conversation that took place at that conference whether it was in the lobby the hotel amongst people or at a restaurant or a lunch or cocktail party or any of the presentations that were given the word china was mentioned over and over and over again ad nauseam it was just china it was all about china and everybody was running to china to sell scrap to china probably china at the time was you had to register what they call for aqs iq and fill out forms and whatnot i remember looking at the paperwork and it didn’t really interest me because i was satisfied with the circle of clients i had without very good relationships and i said you know

what is the point to run to sell to chinese markets where i am supply number 755 and a group of the thousands that is just showing up there and i don’t have a personal relationship with the buyers whereas in the existing buyers and all the companies i was working with i either knew the managers that were buying or the owners of the mills and i decided to stick really to that but i can truly say my entire career i the only container cars i sold to china were three in all these years and two one was direct and the other two was actually through a hong kong-based trader so i i never really ran to that but china did make a change and as you’ll see in today’s market china does is a player as well but in my opinion the big two big uh changes that changed the this industry around was the fall of the iron curtain disappearance of communism and the start of the container business yeah i mean i could see how that could really open the whole just the whole deal back up it’s just even reversing back

to what you were saying and you were selling it to india and even though you were selling it to the to the state foreign they were splitting it up well now all of a sudden you don’t you don’t have to worry about that because you can just send the containers and they can it’s a lot easier for them to split up because it’s already containerized and it can come in in smaller amounts correct so i could i could definitely see how that that uh that that’s just a game changer that’s that’s our industry in a nutshell is you know there’s always going to be sticky times there’s going to be the 09s the i look back and i think about my dad and my dad and my mom partnered with schnitzer steele in 1997 1997 um the scrap industry was doing was pretty good 1998 99 it was a rough it was it was the pricing that had came down and they’re like we just bought a new share and but they were able to stick it out and get through it and get through those early 2000s the 2004 all of a sudden

four started getting good five it got good six seven eight you know as everybody knows were really good years in our industry and i always say that people that are able to persevere the ups and the downs in this in this crazy commodity of scrap you’re going to win in the long run if you can get through the dips you know i i would assume as a trader there’s you you you feel those dips and you feel the the landscape changing whether it’s geographically or how big of a role did the internet play in the trading business unbelievable unbelievable role so i i spoke about this at a conference uh a few years ago at the bir conference in hong kong so when i walked in when i before i started work at markridge 1984 had a job at a smaller trading company i just got my feet wet and one they were communications were by telex basically and um words were abbreviated wherever possible that was the fastest way to communicate and the fastest way to give carbon copies to everybody else who needed to see these exchanges um one day an announcement

was made in the office oh we bought a fax and everybody ran to what was called the telex room to look what is a fax and in those days when you wanted to send the fax not everybody had a fax what you did is you took your document that you typed up you went around the corner to one of the local fedex offices and fedex faxed it to their fedex office in l.a or brussels or london where they went and you sent the address was supposed to be delivered and then the next day it printed over there when they came into the office they pulled it off the fax they put an envelope and a messenger would deliver it to the office we had to go that’s how fedex operated with the fax in those days um so the way it worked in those days is let’s say if you made an offer to korea so you’d send out an email a telex that night to korea it’s offered them a cargo price whatever you’re offering all abbreviated terms in language and the next morning you would get a telex back from korea

saying okay the buyer wants to change the tonnage she wants this breakdown this price and you’d go back again that night with a second message to him and finally if the your agent or your office over there was getting closer to booking a deal he would drum up the nerve to call you on your home line because nobody had business lines at home or cell phones accordion you’d finally book the business so from monday night since you sent out your first offer by telex till the deal was done was ready wednesday morning till the deal was done so it took three days basically to negotiate a deal today with email you know i send out an email with an offer an hour later i have a counter and a comment and i respond right away and before i’m even done with dinner it’s done it’s put to bed and i don’t go to bed at night without sending out the contract that’s right contracts have to be typed up on carbon papers with copies and if you made a type with an electric typewriter and if you had a typo you had to use

a one of these white out things to correct it today it’s all a template all you need to do is go ahead and change the dates the price the tarnish the breakdown and the latest shipping date you’re good to go the rest is is a repeat with every buyer so as a result we work much more intense and much faster and we work more that’s just how it is the communications has changed a lot but not only the way we communicate with each other the way market information travels i mean more people go to conferences and they meet uh staff from the steamboats and the recyclers and they meet and they talk and exchange cards and everyone has a website and everyone has a twitter and internet and and whatnot then it all moves and and you know in those days metal bulletin was like the only metal bulletin and the japanese um was it called um tax report were the only industry publications that were reporting on ferrous grass and metal bulletin was mailed out every week in the us to the companies in this in the states and in the uk to

the uk companies and every head of the department would get one copy of that week’s metal bulletin and there was a hierarchy so the boss got it first and the next guy in the next hand by the time it would get to me while i was working in the states there were already two other issues that were published the news was old a metal bulletin would call us every night and ask where’s the prices at where’s the market that and truthful we would tell them what we wanted to tell them this is just how it went and you were able to dictate that to them it wasn’t just on scrap it worked the same in steel and in oil and in others who was to check who was to know the difference you basically told them what you wanted to tell them what it suited you to tell them today that doesn’t work anymore i mean a deal a sale is done in turkey i mean part of my expression is someone farts in turkey and within minutes you smell it in the space okay yeah that’s how quick it travels and then for

the entire the rest of that day you get endless what’s up messages and sms messages with this seller sold this cargo at this price to this buyer in turkey and it goes around the world and every few of them is fake news or they get an error something goes wrong and it gets repeated over and over and over across the world which makes turkey an extremely transparent market but the same reporting isn’t doesn’t happen on the sales to mexico or to egypt or to other places yeah so you know what i like about that nate what i like about it is if you’re good at your job then you’re gonna win like when the when everybody has the information there’s no secrets anymore like there’s no secret pricing there’s no you know i tell p i tell our guys all the time like everybody knows the price like the price is the price now it comes back down to relationships and the people and do people trust you do they trust what you’re selling them do they trust do they do they want to buy from you because you’re not going to sell them

some bill of goods that’s bs it’s just it is what it is and i i say it comes back down to now the internet squeezed all the information out and it’s really who’s good at their job and the traders like yourself or you know the processor is like myself we feel like we’re really good at what we do and we’ve built good relationships over the years those the information doesn’t scare me anymore you know i’m like go ahead you know the price of number one copper or the price of steel but who’s going to take care of you and do exactly what they said and the product’s going to arrive exactly when i said and it’s going to be what i said it was you know it’s true but um you with all that you still need luck brains and you need to be the right time in the right place you really need luck is really a big factor you can be just the sharpest guy out there and you know that means whatever you do you’re thinking it through but you still need luck things can go wrong that are so out

of your control that you just cannot control now the question is how do you tackle them how do you approach the problem that arises unexpectedly um which comes back to the operator that still to me is the person that’s able to deal with those situations like you needed luck in life there’s no doubt about it i i agree with that but it still comes back down to the operator and how do you deal with those situations right how do you make sure your customer understands hey i couldn’t prevent this this is what happened and we’re gonna but we’re gonna figure out a way right it comes back down to that relationship and that those personal um um those personal feelings between each other that you’ve done business before this is something that is has come up whether it’s a weather issue or a loading issue or a product issue they know that you’re willing to stick by and work through the issue go back to customer service yep so my give me a little bit of different i mean just because i’m very ignorant when it comes to the uh the difference between the

east coast and west coast this is one thing we’ve kind of talked about what is the difference you know whether it’s geographics as far as where the materials shipping or what drives east coast uh bulk and container freight versus uh west coast bulking container for eight so the east coast and the west coast obviously two different uh playing fields in a way first of all the east coast has a dome has a different domestic layered alliance and the west coast has a different domestic layer of the land and then you still have also close to the east coast the midwest and that part of the country um but when you’re looking at the export markets of bosque both coasts um each coast has its for most part it’s dedicated markets so with the with just a few exceptions so for example you look at the west coast a west coast bulk cargo will automatically go to korea it used to go to taiwan but not anymore japan the one car would they buy a year indonesia malaysia vietnam thailand bangladesh and usually the east coast of india the deviation point between east and west

coast us is usually the tip of india whether it’s east coast of india or west coast of india that was the general rule years ago but there’s obviously exceptions when you look at the east coast exports your markets are usually turkey egypt greece italy and then saudi arabia qatar the west coast of india but also mexico brazil ecuador peru guatemala those are your countries for the markets for the east coast okay now there are exceptions to this for example um peru and ecuador obviously also in pakistan work off the west coast as well as the work of the east coast as well even though they are on the west coast of south america um and there are some very very rare exceptions here and i’m speaking of experience here where the stars really have to align and scrap prices have to be depressed and freighters have to be down but we’ve had seen this before where a situation presents itself that asia is so weak that you are actually able to sell a west coast cargo all the way to turkey or to greece or to egypt from the west coast because the asians

aren’t buying any of it and it’s got to go somewhere so you have no choice and i remember in 1995 or 96 while at glencore we had a cargo from that we had bought as a trader from schnitzer and we were shipping it to turkey we sold it to turkey it was the first west coast cargo ever sold to turkey in 1995 and um you know the turks used to always send an inspector to be present their own rep to be present i remember my guy in our office in istanbul was telling us that the guys amongst them at the buyer were fighting who’s going to go to los angeles on the trip who’s going to go to l.a and could we help with uh tourist sites and you know things like that everybody had their own interest on it and then i have to say a few years later actually schnitzel steel did one over us and schnitzel actually sold a hawaii cargo to um to turkey again this is this goes back late late 90s i think or early 2000s i’m not really sure but west coast we were the glencoe

was the first one and then there were others that sold from the west coast to turkey and then at some point i think schnitzel also sold actually from hawaii so that works and here for example about three years ago i actually negotiated the sale from the west coast to greece it was done because the prices were the freights were cheap and the asians weren’t buying the deal was pretty much done but at some point we decided to alter the the deal because um the voyage time from the west coast was really too long that is an extra two weeks so that you have to take into account but each coast has roughly basically they’re dedicated export markets where they look at uh doing shipments too um so go ahead no no go ahead so where do you if you were to rub your crystal ball today and say you know what are the big influential markets that are present that should last you know the next uh six months to to a couple years where or do you see any new new markets uh opening up new export opportunities or you know you hear

a lot of rumblings about china coming back into the market very heavily are you feeling any of that from a trade trader’s perspective i i think the china thing is a lot of hype yes they need scrap and they’re going to come and buy scrap there’s a lot of hype that’s been associated with it people wanting the prices wanting to use that as a basis to push the prices up and uh a lot of noise making like for example last week there was a deal circulating that a u.s west coast cargo was sold to china i’m not convinced it’s true i haven’t found the seller yet i asked the rounds i haven’t come across anyone who has sold the cargo i know who’d be foolish enough to sell the cargo because the chinese terms on quality control are beyond reasonable and i can’t imagine anyone exposing themselves wanting to take this type of saying i think until the chinese don’t adjust their contracts it’s going to be an issue they’re not going to people are not going to run to embrace their bulk cargos so what so the japanese salt three times three

thousand tons of scrap that’s peanuts that’s nothing yeah all right so japanese are very uh disciplined they can’t probably comply with what the chinese want i don’t think the average european or american wants to make their effort or should make the efforts when there is better and easier term business in other places i think south america is a hot spot for scrap we’re seeing it now as a result of the corona crisis and the lockdowns they had so there’s not enough scrap thing there’s not enough steel over there so that’s certainly a hot market and i definitely think that central asia will grow and develop further so bangladesh india pakistan um again those are not new markets younger traders tend to think they’re new markets but they’re like on a uh what they call making a comeback these markets because they were around in the 80s you know but vietnam those markets uh also there but do i see any new markets i’m not convinced i hear rumblings of stimulus across africa owned by chinese groups that are buying scrap and i actually have sold scrap years ago in containers from um from the

uk and from israel to in containers to uh to africa to tanzania not i’m not convinced that’s just ready yet for the taking although it’s may one day but i i don’t really see any new frontiers what i think you will see happening is certain economies will either for whatever reason expand like crazy and really do well and and build up more steel requirements i have more requirements for steel and therefore for more scrap and some economies won’t do well at certain years and they’ll cut back and i think um brazil is a classic example of that how they went over the years from being a big importer of bulk cargos to stopping all the imports to an economical crisis to not generating any scrap to then exporting scrapping containers to then stopping that and and importing again in bulk um and we’ve seen other countries sort of taking a break from importing scrap and then going back to buying scrap what will be the in your opinion what will be the biggest driver of the us export market whether it’s east coast west coast what do you see as as pushing export volume

or pricing what do you see as the big factors that will enable that to happen i’m not sure i’m not sure you know we’re coming off uh in general i don’t love to predict things sometimes you have a gut feeling about something and sometimes you get right sometimes you don’t i think we’re in a situation where the entire world every country has had issues with this corona crisis some have dealt with it in better ways than others but every economy left right and center has suffered um scrap is a product of affluence if the economy does well it generates a lot of scrap and therefore you have more scrap and if there’s chronic it doesn’t do well then you don’t generate the scrap i i think pretty much we’re going to see turkey buying the same amount of scrap and you know we’ll see some of the middle east countries maybe developing having more demand for steel and as a result the steels will grow and they’ll buy more scrap and maybe some of the scrap that is normally shipped to turkey will somehow divert and go into some of the middle eastern countries

i think these abram accords were seen between israel and the gulf states i see a lot i read a lot of chatter that’s going on there’s a lot of demands um construction expansion building a lot of investments being made and all that does somehow result in requirements for construction and steel and therefore demand for scrap so that region is poised for an expansion um i did read a lot about afro many countries looking at africa to try and really invest into africa to build up their economies and make that growth like what i said there’s a lot of chinese steelers across africa that have been built that will require some scrap at some point but i think for now i believe uh south america is going to continue buying scrap and hopefully exporting us all but i think you’re looking at south america and central southeast asia that’s what i think are the big uh areas i so as taiwan is concerned taiwan was once a very very serious importer of scrap bulk as well as containers then it cut out all the bulk exports other than small japanese vessels but i don’t call

that bulk i’m talking about 30 000 summers and it’s all become containerized and over the years i think we’re going to see um cheaper freight and a lot of cheap steel eventually moving from china into taiwan which will force its way into the taiwanese steel industry and weaken the taiwanese steel industry to appoint or create a situation which some stimulus won’t be able to make it anymore so i think unless in the long run i do think that less steel will be produced in taiwan more of it will come from china um so that they’re not going to be as major player as they are i mean for example today or the last 20 years anytime i speak to an asian buyer or i speak to an american container exporter when the subject when the quest he asked me when i’m asked the question where’s the market at or what’s scrap out what’s the price of scrap i know that the answer he wants is the cfr price for hms in containers to taiwan even if he’s not taiwanese if he’s malaysian or indonesian but that’s his market indicator that’s what in the what

indicates to him with the market is it up is it down and that’s what he looks at and follows it um when i speak to a bulk exporter in europe in the united states and to a turkish buyer the question comes up of where scrap today i know they’re looking for the cfr price to turkey in bulks but that wasn’t always the case you know if you take it back to the 1980s it asked me where’s the market i would give you the fobst rotterdam price for scrap for the turks and not the cfr price because in those days they were all buying on fobs d basis why were they buying on for bsd basis because the turkish government was given 30 percent rebates of tax rebates or subsidies for any turkish steel mill company that was chartering a turkish flagship so they would buy the cargos for bsd in rotterdam or united states and the east coast every single charter their own ship even owns their own ships and what to get the tax break correct to get the tax breaks and that’s how i was born that’s how the turks bought so

the there was no cfr turkey price it was an fob rotterdam or fobs the east coast price that was the market was and then when turkey decided they wanted to join the european union european said okay we’re not going to have any of these um preferential treatments you need to do away with these rebates and other things they need to do away with and therefore there was no more advantage for the turkish females to chart your own ships and so we stopped chartering they started to buy on cfr basis that’s how the cfr turkish price became a thing at the container taiwan price didn’t exist until taiwan started to buy containers and by the way there was a korean container price there was a market indicator before the taiwan price was a market indicator but somehow taiwan led the way with that one eventually so market indicators changed and i’m convinced we’ll see soon a market indicator for a bangladesh price or for an indian price because wherever the biggest volumes of scrap will move to that’s where what will become the indication where people look at basically okay so i want to end

i want to end our interview on one question that and you know i read in an interview you did um it was it in scrap magazine i believe um and you noted that i mean you come from a big trading house company whether it’s ghost brothers or mark rich you know where they traded everything from oil to aluminum steel you name it um but you say scrap is a people commodity is what i in quotations and i believe that to be true i believe i believe in relationships i believe in conversations like this where i mean i never would have ever had a reason to deal with you because i don’t export steel i don’t export bulk but now that we’ve been able to meet and communicate you know now i’m forming these type of relationships but scrap when you say scrap is a people commodity do you want to just expand on that real quick before we end this uh podcast sure first of all scrap is really all i know um i’ve dealt with my whole my entire career that’s on 36 years um and so that’s what you know but scrap

is a commodity you touch it you feel it you smell it you breathe it you live it basically i mean i got my own shredder pile of scrap in the office i think i sent you a picture of that you know i’m gonna put that on this pocket okay so you know it’s a commodity you look at it i mean every recycler i have ever bought scrap the golden rule was whenever you know when i moved to to to london my goal was i spoke fluent french german and dutch and my boss said you your mission is to go and to tap in to all the dutch the french and the german recyclers go visit them see them buy their scrap and ship it to the terminals that’s how you build up and many of them were at it was like many mom and pop shops they didn’t even speak english okay and luckily i spoke german and french and dutch and i was able to communicate with them and that’s how i developed relationships with them and some trust was gained but the golden rule was always never ever by scrap from a

recycler whose yard you didn’t walk through you didn’t visit it you didn’t check is it clean is it on a hot concrete floor is it environmentally compliant or does it look environmentally compliant or is there garbage all over the place is it attended to is it not that’s what you’re looking for and the handful of times where i dared to buy scrap from guys where i didn’t go to visit them i didn’t meet them didn’t look them in the eye i didn’t feel comfortable with them i usually regretted it it didn’t end well and so that was a good rule so that’s right away this is an element of trust if i want to load 20 containers on the west coast from a supplier he’s not going to touch my containers until i wired him ninety percent or 100 of the cargo value only then when he start loading my containers and so you are advancing anyway from 50 to 200 000 to a guy you obviously trust him there’s a there’s a bond over there um so that’s what makes this a personal opinion and the same with the buyers i like i

said i visited i traveled all over the world i was very blessed and one of the things at mark richard and glencoe was if you smell the business somewhere they said go ahead fly there run after it go after it and they knew not every business will lead to something but if you if you had six or seven businesses out of ten such ships that you made then you had a decent track record then that was acceptable yeah and i was very blessed i really traveled like three four times a year in the beginning all across southeast asia and turkey and greece to visit our buyers and the steamers and you develop a relationship either with the managers that buy the scrap from you or even the steel owners i had a steel owner who uh i’ve organized a vacation for him because he wanted to travel to a destination that i knew very well and i you know gave him the express tour so um and if ever a problem occurs there’s a relationship that you know how to resolve it i mean you mentioned the crisis there 2009 or an eight it

was yeah in this end yeah okay in those days scrap prices and containers were up to ages six seven hundred dollars a ton seven hundred fifty dollars a ton cfr to korea indonesia malaysia and a lot of these businesses were done either with letter of credit every once in a while there was no letter of credit and i remember that particular buyer who i was friendly with why traveled took him on a vacation trip he wanted to go on a trip i took him there he the market was coming down it’s already 150 market drop and my agent in singapore said nate please get on the plane come right away to singapore which want to secure we’re not going to have any issues saying i met him and he said hey look nate i know you i trust you i’ve worked with you so many years a lot of respect for you i’m not going to give you a haircut i don’t want you to be nervous i know you’re a one-man show you’re your own company if you know i need to change the contract price on you i know it’s going

to hurt you i don’t want to do that i’m asking you as a favor i need you to find a way to give me three weeks the late payment meaning instead of paying me three four days from the bill of lading day from when the cargo sales let me pay you three weeks from then i said i will do my best and i called from there with him i called my supplier in florida who was the one shipping the goods i had a very good relationship with him at the time and um i explained the problem this is look the guy is asking for three weeks break you’re protected we’re not going to suffer any losses others were already losing up to 100 a ton on their contract or getting cancellations and he says nate you do what you do no problem and so i was i gave him the three weeks and at the end of the three saturday in two three days i’ll get done and i trusted him and by the third day the funds were there and thankfully i was very grateful i never suffered that way okay other things

went wrong with other people you don’t know so well but it’s a personal relationship it’s how you tackle a problem how you address a quality issue um you know you can’t let tempers prevail you need to be respectful to the other side and put yourself walk in their shoes and try to see and understand the problem from their side and hope they will see it also from your side and then there’s some way you can figure it out but have a long-term a long-term view of of the of your of your career have a long-term view of the industry and you know you even if you have to take three weeks or you have to take a haircut because everybody’s taking a haircut you have to say the relationship is more important a year two five ten years from now then the haircut i’m gonna have to take today to maintain stability for everybody right that’s that people side of our business that nobody likes to lose money nobody likes to be in a bind but when the this industry is as big as it is it’s very small as well

and people talk and like going back to your reference if somebody farts in turkey you smell in the u.s in a few minutes that’s that goes that’s across the board anymore people know who the quality operators are who the brokers are who the quality consumers are they know and there’s no there’s no hiding anymore i want to finish on one more small story to allow me to tell you after this story we’re good to go you tell but i’m ready let’s see so um auto ghost was already retired he was already out of the game and i was in singapore on a trip and i my on one particular cargo there was a quality dispute and with the same buyer who i told you about this relationship said he was going to give me a heck was a quality issue cargo arrived wasn’t good um and we did we were stuck we were at impasse we didn’t know how to resolve it you know uh in the hotel lobby you know the buyer sat there i sat there and my agent in singapore started the three of us brainstorming trying to figure out

how to resolve this and the buyer says to me let’s call alter goldstein he knew also very well for many years from doing this before me let’s put the case out in front of alta we’ll let him decide okay i guess a mediator exactly exactly and so it was we went up to all went up to my room i put the phone on speaker we called old i remember it was like 10 o’clock in the morning in singapore it was 10 p.m in new york the night before we called alter got him on the phone said hi i have our friends here on the phone we had a very nice conversation says look we need you to be the mediator here and all to listen to my case to his case to everyone’s case and all that and then he ruled in favor of the buyer not in my favor obviously i kept my closer really wondering why hi etc but and i accepted it there and then how it was and that was the end of it and then that night i called alter back and says i don’t understand you why

didn’t you pick my side you said it was very 50 50 the whole thing and it said by giving you awarding you your case the way you wanted it you were not going to get as much out of it than by giving him the case to where he wanted it and that will work for you longer in the long term that will go a long way for you and he was right he really was right and years later i sensed that what the author had told me was really true that judging in his favor choosing his side was the right thing to do so that’s awesome yeah and we all have mentors and you know like that’s all i mean you and i we were talking about this we this is going to be like probably a two or three part podcast because there’s just so much landscape to cover and time and i know we’re never going to get to at all but i do just want to tell you thank you again and i look forward to getting you back on the podcast and covering some questions that obviously we never we

didn’t get to but i just i can’t i can’t say thank you enough and how much i appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule this evening and sitting down with me and just you know giving me a little bit of a history lesson and scrap and bulk and hopefully everybody else out there that gets the opportunity to listen to this uh really appreciates it as much as i did absolute pleasure thank you for having me it’s really nice doing this likewise you’ll be in touch all right thank you guys thank you nathan i appreciate it thank you good night take care bye bye