Godiver Handelsgesellschaft m.b.H. with headquarters in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria, was founded in 1987 by Mr. Dieter Feyertag together with Giuseppe and Alessandro Godi, owners of the Quarella Group of Companies headquartered at Verona, Italy, the world´s biggest producer of agglomerated marble with connected industrial activities. Today Godiver is 100% owned by Mr. Feyertag and rated among the 100 top Austrian companies by Duns (Bisnode, 2015).  Godiver is part of the World Refining Association (WRA) in the United Kingdom. Besides, Godiver had a JV with Lukoil, Tscheljabinsk, was owner of Feyertag Trading House in Switzerland, and main shareholder in five biodiesel plants.

The company disposes of an entirely subscribed equity capital of EUR 600.000 and with the teamwork of five employees the yearly turnover in 2015 has been approx. 7 million EUR.

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Business Activities

Godiver is specialized in the physical trade of the following commodities:

• Organic and inorganic chemical products

• Crude oil, oil products and petrochemicals

• Salt of food grade quality according to HACCP standards and for de-icing purposes

• Biodiesel and its associated raw materials, such as vegetable oils (rapeseed, waste cooking, palm and soya oils). In the trading of biodiesel, Godiver has been a pioneer and has also managed five biodiesel plants worldwide.

• Ferrous and non-ferrous metals and associated scrap materials (tungsten, pyrite)

Further the company is active in and/or has a profound experience in:

• Barter business primarily with Eastern European countries and Asia

• Recycling of materials e.g. synthetic rubber and plastic materials, bitumen roofing

• Financing physical trades and/or business projects

• Supplying and off-taking of chemicals and oil products with military organizations in some European and North African countries.

• Financing Italian industries from Austria due to the unstable financial and tax situation in Italy, also handling their VAT and Excise Tax obligations.

Logistics play a key role for any commodity trader and is one of the company’s core competencies, with logistic partners around the globe. In addition, the company was involved in the construction of 6.000 rail cars with cisterns for the company KVG and sold the type RGS to several Italian ports.

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Strategy and Projects

Godiver is oriented on long term business cooperation with special focus on niche markets taking advantage of the combination of extensive market research with trusted personal key contacts resulting in, for example and not limited to:

• 1989 -1992: Godiver crushing the Russian oil monopoly by tapping its pipeline in Hungary whereby it got access to important gasoil volumes for the European market

• 1992 – 1995: Godiver became the major buyer of non-cracked fuel oil from Turkmenistan

• 1998 – today: Godiver being active in the trading of biodiesel raw materials and the trading of biodiesel itself despite global demand on a declining trend. Godiver is financing research on second and third generation biomass energy products such as BTL (biomass to liquid).

• 2012 – today: Godiver is supplying the North African market with chemicals and industrial goods.

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Risk Management

Godiver is not taking any proprietary trading risk positions. In alternative, the company is structuring its physical commodities transactions on a back-to-back basis. As a consequence thereof, Godiver is not in a position to control its own niches where it has been able to carve out its strongholds over the years so that the company needs to reinvent itself in the course of every three to five years.

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Financial details

Under Austrian Law, companies such as Godiver public their balance sheets under the company registry at Klagenfurt. Godiver is allowed under Austrian Law to accounts its gross trading profits as turnover without any further auditing requirements to comply with needed for their balance sheets not meeting the threshold as established under the Law.

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Management

Godiver´s team is made of five people, three family members, one Senior Partner with procuration and a back-office. All team members are graduated in diverse disciplines and each member is multilingual. For its flat hierarchy the company´s owner and managing director, Mr. Dieter Feyertag is holding a key position in generating and executing business opportunities.