Anybody heard of or worked for Mitsui Bussan Commodities?

Japanese companies are ultra conservative. In saying this, Mitsui and Itochu are more progressive in their trading style, and pushing for more market share in 3rd party trading rather than relying on the traditional biz mode of serving Japanese end users. I have seen some senior promotions given and considered to non-Japanese individuals (more with Mitsui). Generally speaking they are slow in decision making due to bureaucracy and sheer size of the company’s. They have a rigorous approach when it comes to targeting select customers in order to not conflict with other shoga shosha’s - this is the Japanese business etiquette of respecting relationships. Japanese biz model in the late 2000’s have switched from being purely trading to investments in upstream activities to secure equity offtakes. During the mid-end 2010’s they are started to expand into more 3rd party trading activities, and like most organisations are viewing to exiting selected mining investments such as coal to support the climate accord. Nonetheless, they are a good place to work and put on your CV. Being a Japanese company they have solid SOPs in place and good business practices in international trade. Furthermore, it is a huge network of offices globally which support fundamental information flow across all desks. As mentioned above, they can be quite slow in decision making and that is a disadvantage for physical trading especially in the spot market, however, they make up for it in long term agreements. The market views selling to a shoga shosha on a term arrangement provides stable cashflow and counterparty risks are low, as it’s a Japanese business practice to always honour agreements. If Mitsui Bussan can leverage market intel from the group then it would be advantageous. However, I’m not certain on how their paper guys are allocated risk or if they are given any drawdowns/daily VaR for spec, or if they have the capacity to do any spec.