.png)
Recently, I spent some time with Enuit CEO Ken Han and President David Meyers who started Enuit as a commodity agnostic product company focused initially on US natural gas and power. Enuit has opened a London office, hired a team of industry veterans and is targeting CTRM opportunities globally.
In 2014, Enuit expanded into Asia and added a bulk commodities focus including metals, ores, LNG, Oil and so on. In Asia, Enuit started to work with a lot of international trading companies for their local desks. However, these companies soon began to see that the Enuit Entrade product could also meet their business requirements in other locations like London. In particular, Mr Han pointed to how this had started with a major trader in metals, but Enuit had also seen similar success in oil as well. In a sense, it seems that Enuit has had a presence in Europe for some time.
“We originally thought the UK office would be just another office,” he told me. “However, it has its own back office for invoicing and accounting, and quite independent operations as it turns out. We believe Entrade can cover the bulk commodity CTRM needs in Europe and globally.” Indeed, some of Enuit’s customers are using it for global operations. “We saw the opportunity and set a strategy of centralized development out of Houston but with de-centralized support, sales and so on,” he told me. The Enuit London office already has 5 employees with an intent to grow the business. “The team is quite established to position for growth,” Mr Han said. “However, we had been exploring additional opportunities in Europe even before opening the office there in areas like natural gas and power in the UK and Europe. The system is ready for the market in all areas except perhaps interfaces as these are plainly specific to the territory.”
Mr Han is remarkably realistic in his approach to the market. “We were a small fish when we got started,” he said. “But over the last few years, we have grown substantially and we position the Entrade product differently to the competition. Its functionality is on a par or better but its footprint is significantly lighter. We believe the market is looking for and needs something like that.” Indeed, as he told me, the company and the product is now ready to be more aggressive in terms of positioning and visibility. “Many customers have lost faith in CTRM suppliers but we are different, fresh and ready for the challenge.”
Mr Han also sees that many commodity firms are trying to adopt new technologies and engage in digitalization with things like RPA, Blockchain and so on. While they want to take advantage of these newer technologies, they don’t want to have to abandon their systems just for that reason. With that in mind, Enuit is looking at its technology roadmap and “moving to be more web-based and more smartphone oriented. Our strategy is to incrementally migrate to the web starting with reporting and workflow,” he said.
Both Mr Han and Mr Meyers pointed out that they see Enuit as not just another CTRM product vendor. They have a mission statement and are working on executing that. Part of that mission statement is about having better quality people, focusing on the customer and ensuring they have the right knowledge and attitude to serve. As an ex VP of marketing myself, those are pretty strong brand qualities and the only way to ensure that the Enuit brand becomes known for them is to act on them – for customers and the broader market to experience them. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
Comentários