Catching the Lion: RWEST Asia Pacific

Peter Krembel, Chief Commercial Officer Trading at RWEST, was on site for the inauguration. Why was it so important to further expand the offices? “For me, the expansion of the offices is the visible proof and an essential building block of our successful growth story in Asia,” says Krembel, adding “We want to take advantage of the growth trend in the region, increasingly tap into our trade flows in the Asian region, and sustainably and organically expand our Trading & Origination business. To this end, we have significantly increased the number of employees both in the commercial business and in the support functions. Further expansion of the business is being planned and in some cases is already underway.”

In future, there will be around 35 employees in Singapore instead of the current 25. According to Peter Krembel, there is room for further expansion in the future. All in all, the new hires are very balanced. Additional analysts and junior traders from the in-house graduate programme joined the front office; the teams were expanded both in the LNG business and in physical coal and iron ore trading. The support functions were filled by specialists from the areas of legal, HR, IT and finance, primarily by local colleagues from Singapore.

RWEST Asia Pacific will act as a holding company in the Asia-Pacific region and from Singapore it will manage RWEST’s growth targets in Asia. With this platform, the Beijing-based Wholly Foreign Owned Entity (WFOE) established in the Shanghai Free Zone, Indonesia-based PT Rheincoal and the planned RWEST trading unit in Japan have a solid growth base for RWEST Trading & Origination’s Asian business.