The Tokyo Commodity Exchange (“TOCOM” or the “Exchange”) announced a new three-year Midterm Management Plan covering fiscal 2012 through fiscal 2014.
To quickly address changes in its business environment, the Exchange has adopted rolling annual updates of its three-year Midterm Management Plans. The actual results for fiscal 2011 and changes in the Exchange’s business environment served as the basis for revising last year’s the three-year Midterm Management Plan for fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2013.
TOCOM has reversed the decline in its trading volume that began in fiscal 2004. The Exchange achieved average daily trading volume of 126,000 contracts (estimated) for fiscal 2011, for a year-on-year increase of 10 percent.
In fiscal 2012, emphasis will be placed on increasing the number and diversity of TOCOM market participants with the aim of placing trading volume on a firm growth trend.
In order to achieve this, the Exchange has set the following six strategic pillars in the new Midterm Management Plan:
- Market participants: Strengthen sales activities aimed at gaining a diverse set of market participants
- Product lineup: Develop new contracts tailored to investors’ needs
- Market design: Further improve the convenience of trading in the market
- Business base: Bolster the business base in ways that promote commodity market growth
- Improve industry-wide image: Improve the image of the commodity futures trading in Japan
- Clearing services: Further develop and strengthen the clearing functionality
In addition, we will pursue further cost reductions to lower the breakeven point (in terms of trading volume), and provide a base to make our operations profitable (at the ordinary income level on a consolidated basis) in fiscal 2012, given that the trading volume exceeds the level of 2011 (126,000 contracts per day).
For details on the new Midterm Management Plan, please refer here.