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The rise and fall of a commodities giant in Asia

Bloomberg Published on Mon, Jun 05, 2017 / 9:05 AM GMT+8

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(June 5): The profit warning landed at 10.37pm Singapore time on a Tuesday in early May. It was the night before a holiday in the city-state where shares of Noble Group are traded. The market would be closed the next day, giving investors more than 24 hours to digest the information. On Thursday the stock fell 32%, its biggest-ever one-day drop. It’s fallen further since.

Based in Hong Kong, Noble was once Asia’s largest commodity trader, with a market value of more than US$10 billion ($13.8 billion), greasing the wheels of the global trade in metals, minerals, oil, and agricultural goods. It’s currently worth US$336 million. “Noble is fighting for its life now,” Owen Gallimore, head of credit strategy at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group, said in a May 23 interview.

The company was founded by Richard Elman, a British high school dropout and onetime teenage scrap metal laborer. It’s named for Noble House, James Clavell’s novel set at a Hong Kong trading firm. Elman positioned the company to ride the wave of China’s unparalleled economic boom beginning in the early 2000s. “They were in a sweet spot,” says Nicholas Teo, trading strategist at KGI Securities Singapore.