The Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME) has announced that it reached the eight billion barrel mark in March, with a total of eight million contracts (equivalent 8 billion barrels) traded on the exchange.

The increased interest in DME’s value proposition driven by new members from Asia and their participation has contributed to the Exchange’s trading performance and enabled it to hit this new milestone, despite the current challenging conditions for the global oil markets, a statement said.

This achievement reinforces DME Oman's position as the most credible trading benchmark for the Asian crude oil markets. The DME Oman contract currently is the largest physically delivered crude oil futures contract in the world.

“As the only exchange capable of bridging the most significant global crude oil corridor between the Middle East and Asia, the DME’s central role in providing a fair price discovery mechanism for crude oil heading east through the DME Oman contract, especially during these volatile times, has never been more important,” said Christopher Fix, chief executive officer of DME.

“The DME has developed a great deal of trust among customers in Asia due to its transparent trading mechanism and strong regulation. This in turn has helped the Exchange to register this impressive performance of reaching the 8 billion barrels traded milestone.”

“The growth of the Asian derivatives market and the increased appetite for risk management and hedging has also benefitted the DME,” said Fix. “The Exchange looks forward to establishing a closer relationship with our expanding Asian customer base in order to maintain our upward trajectory in terms of trading growth.” – TradeArabia News Service