Commodity exchanges in Asia push for local liquidity

Asian commodity exchanges are slowly moving to fulfill their potential to become liquidity hubs for an array of commodity benchmarks relevant to market participants in Asia. But international relevance is still a challenge.

Many Asian exchanges have made significant inroads into catching up with their global peers in terms of trading financial derivatives. But the same cannot be said for commodities derivatives, where trading volumes – stripping out domestic China and India exchanges – largely remain on US and European markets.

This is irrespective of the Asia-Pacific region emerging as a growth driver of consumption and supply of commodities. Take for instance robusta coffee for which Vietnam and Indonesia are the