Glencore: A Swiss giant on the edge

I caught a post today on the Swiss Blog Zeitenwende about Glencore, the Swiss corporate giant, which should reinforce the fact that this credit crisis is far from over. As the original post was in German, I have translated it into English below:

If Charts could speak, what would the following one tell us then? This concerns five-year Credit default Swaps of the company Glencore. In case you have never heard of this company, then now is the critical time. Glencore is the largest enterprise by turnover in Switzerland, recording record sales of 142.3 billion USD in 2007. According to its own data, Glencore directly or indirectly employs 52,000 employees. And obviously some of it has gone pear-shaped

The company, which is active in raw materials, was originally founded by notorious Marc Rich and has always been completely in private ownership.

Today Glencore ranks among the leading raw material companies world-wide and deals with, among other things, production, processing and trade of aluminum, alumina, bauxite, ferrous alloys, nickel, zinc, copper, lead, coal and oil, as well as agricultural products. Right now, things are looking bad for raw materials. Apparently, bad is how things are going at Glencore, if this Chart reflects the reality of the company. Only – one does not know the details. Concerning the rumors that Glencore could be having liquidity problems, an analyst at BNP said that the company has more than 3.5 billion USD of cash and open lines of credit as of the end of of Octobers.

The chart speaks volumes. While you may have never heard of Glencore until now, I suspect it is a company that will become very familiar to us in due course.

Source
Was ist nur mit Glencore los? – Zeitenwende