The GDT Events Oversight Board has approved two rule changes to encourage a wider range of sellers to offer dairy ingredients on the auction platform, with the goal to expand the breadth of regional published prices.
The changes will enable sellers to join the platform while retaining a level of privacy over their commercially sensitive data.
Eric Hansen Director Global Dairy Trade, said “the changes represent an important step forward to expand the supply on GDT Events by further reducing barriers to entry for sellers. The changes received unanimous support from all members of the Oversight Board, which includes representatives of buyers, sellers and financial market participants.”
The first change will enable an average winning price to be published as a substitute, or in addition to the publication of each seller’s individual winning prices.
This will enable sellers to join GDT Events and have their published winning prices combined with other seller prices within a regional average, rather than necessarily needing to publish each seller’s individual winning price.
Current sellers Amul, Arla, Arla Foods Ingredients and Fonterra have confirmed they will continue to publish their individual product winning prices.
The second change closes a loophole where a restricted bidder can still view a product’s offer quantity and starting price in the private log-in section of the Information Website, despite a seller restricting that bidder from bidding on one or more of its products.
This approach will avoid the potential for bidder confusion and reduce anti-trust risk as it will prevent a bidder who produces and/or trades the same type of product outside of Global Dairy Trade to access sensitive information. The change will have no impact on public transparency as pre-event data is not displayed on the public section of the website.
At the GDT Event on 3 July, the change in GDT Price Index was –5.0 percent.