Comprehensive risk management for metals and critical materials stakeholders has increasingly become essential as the 2026 market is defined by simultaneous structural supply-demand imbalances, geopolitical restructuring of supply chains, and execution-stage financing risks that no single hedging instrument can address.
Metals markets have entered a structurally volatile phase where supply chains, price formation, and trade routes are increasingly shaped by geopolitics rather than purely by market forces. Producers and processors face simultaneous exposure to commodity price volatility, logistics disruptions, tariff and sanctions risk, and rising working-capital costs. Traditional hedging strategies focused solely on exchange-traded instruments are no longer sufficient to protect margins or secure physical supply.
Without integrated risk management spanning physical supply access, tariff and trade policy exposure, commodity price volatility, and financing execution, metals stakeholders face margin compression, working-capital stress, and supply interruptions that isolated financial hedges cannot mitigate.
Mining, Metals and Materials Markets brings decades of commodity risk management experience and offers an Integrated Risk Stabilisation Program designed to help companies rapidly identify vulnerabilities, protect margins, and strengthen resilience in an increasingly unpredictable global environment.
Phase 1. Risk Heat Map and Action Plan (2 weeks)
A Risk Heat Map provides rapid risk visibility and prioritization by identifying which geographies, supply nodes, and operational assets face the highest geopolitical, logistics, or security risk.
Heat maps enable organisations to quickly assess which risks require immediate attention and which can be monitored over time, supporting prioritisation of risk mitigation efforts. It highlights the most critical vulnerabilities affecting profitability and operational stability. The map forces an acknowledgement of structural constraints before committing to a hedging strategy.
Based on the diagnostic results, we define:
- The top operational and financial risks requiring immediate attention
- potential risk mitigation levers across procurement, logistics, pricing, and financial risk management
- quick-win interventions that can be implemented within weeks
- areas requiring deeper structural adjustments in the following phases
Phase 2. A 30-day plan to address immediate risks
Based on the heat map, we identify which instruments will be most effective to provide rapid risk reduction. In our experience, these often focus on:
- Inventory redistribution and strategic positioning to buffer against identified supply disruptions.
- Implement or refresh financial hedging policy and execute immediate short-term hedges for uncovered price exposures.
- Secure critical supplier agreements and identify contingency sources to ensure supply continuity.
- Establish liquidity lines and review insurance coverage to ensure financial resilience.
- Set up daily position reporting and weekly stress tests to monitor evolving exposures and trigger early-warning mechanisms.
Phase 3. A 90-day plan to structurally de-escalate key risks
This phase addresses structural vulnerabilities identified during the diagnostic.
These include market and price risk, supply security and operational continuity risk, and tariff and trade regulation risks.
Market and price risk
Many producers must manage margin compression on commodity grades while struggling with capacity constraints on higher-value products. The right hedging tools stabilise raw material or sales prices, allowing stable margins.
We offer various price-hedging tools:
- Financial hedging of raw materials or finished metal products or freight cost on exchanges with appropriate exposure and liquidity, or via OTC markets.
- Pricing formulas tied to recognised benchmarks with clear lag periods and look-back provisions to reduce mismatch between geographies and time lag between purchase and sale.
- Long-term supply contracts with critical suppliers incorporating price floors/ceilings or indexed formulas.
- Pass-through clauses for energy, transport, and input-cost spikes embedded in customer contracts.
- Volume-flexibility clauses, force majeure clarity, and termination/renegotiation triggers to manage demand uncertainty and operational disruptions.
Working capital optimisation
- Trade financing structuring to decreaseworking capital and associated costs
- Accounts receivable management and insurance to reduce DSO and credit losses
- Inventory management strategy to optimise the stocks and reduce losses
- Payment routes optimisation and transaction cost reduction
Supply security and operational continuity risk
- Inventory redistribution and safety stockpiles positioned near critical production or customer nodes.
- Increased use of recycled materials to reduce dependency on primary supply chains and mitigate geopolitical exposure.
- Geographic diversification of suppliers to avoid single-country or single-route concentration risk.
- Long-term supply contracts and vertical integration with key suppliers or customers to secure priority allocation.
- Tolling and processing agreements that shift commodity price risk to suppliers while retaining processing margins without owning inventory.
Tariff and trade regulation risks
- Market assessment and prioritization based on demand potential, accessibility, and shipping route security to classify target markets by revenue opportunity and risk exposure.
- Regulatory compliance support, including overview of export regulations, tax credits, tariff classifications, and CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) obligations across different markets.
- Scenario planning for carbon pricing and CBAM, with use of carbon hedges or offsets where needed to manage cost pass-through and compliance obligations.
Phase 4. Implementation of monitoring and control systems
After the 90-day risk de-escalation phase, we implement systems to monitor progress and trigger adjustments as conditions evolve. Risk management is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing process requiring continuous monitoring and adaptation. These systems include:
- Real-time position tracking and exposure dashboards to maintain visibility across physical and financial positions.
- Key Risk Indicators to monitor and reassess risk exposure real-time
- Decision-making and Governance System
- Monthly stress testing against updated scenarios to assess hedge effectiveness and identify emerging gaps.
- Quarterly review of heat maps and scenario assumptions to reflect evolving geopolitical, market, and regulatory conditions.
- Annually strategic review of hedging policy, supplier agreements, and risk appetite in light of performance data and market developments.
This structured, phased approach ensures immediate protection of critical exposures while building the infrastructure for sustained risk resilience across volatile and structurally shifting metals markets.
Our Team:
Olga Kotina — Risk Management & Commodity Markets Advisor
Olga Kotina is a senior risk executive with nearly 20 years of experience in metals production and international commodity trading, including steel, iron ore, coal, chemicals, and fertilizers. She has served as Chief Risk Officer and board-level advisor for global industrial and trading organizations operating in highly volatile and complex market environments.
Olga has designed enterprise risk management frameworks, hedging strategies, and crisis-response systems for large-scale metals and commodity businesses. Her expertise includes commodity price risk and hedging strategies, geoeconomic risks such as sanctions and trade disruptions, supply chain volatility, as well as credit and FX risk in trading operations and regulatory risk management.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/olgakotina/
Krisztina Kalman— Commodity and Material Expert
With over 20 years of experience in strategy and management consulting, Krisztina has been delivering strategic and commercial advisory services, market datasets, and industry research. She developed extensive expertise across key commodity markets, including aluminium, copper, nickel, steel, lithium, cobalt, gold, PGMs, lithium, tin, and zinc.
She is an expert in Recycling, Secondary Material Flows, Critical Minerals, Decarbonization Strategy, Recycled Content Sourcing Strategy, Tariffs and Trade Restrictions and Geographic Material Flow Risk Assessment.
Krisztina holds an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business and frequently presents at international industry conferences (World Aluminium Summit 2026, International Zinc Conference Europe 2026)
