Danube Exim Services works one corridor: the Danube from the Bavarian canal head to the Sulina mouth, and the Black Sea beyond it. Depth on one route rather than a thin presence on many.
The company was built around a plain observation. On this corridor the freight rate is rarely the problem. The problem is the seam between two legs, where a river operator hands over to a port agent, who hands over to a customs broker, and each of them holds a different version of the truth about the cargo.
So we sell the whole leg. Barge, berth, stevedore, wagon, declaration. When a convoy stops because the draught over the bar has dropped, one company reworks the plan and one company carries the cost of having got it wrong.
The trading desk grew out of the same logic. Customers kept asking us to find the cargo as well as move it, and a forwarder who already knows the loading terminal is better placed to price a FOB position than one who does not.
We are deliberately light on layers and deliberately heavy on presence. Our people are at the terminals we book, in the countries whose languages we answer the phone in: English, Turkish and Russian.
The whole leg sits on one contract. There is no seam for a claim to fall into.
We book against berths and river kilometres we have actually used, not against a network diagram.
A rate that ignores the bar at Sulina or the lock windows at the Iron Gate is not a rate, it is a guess.
Declarations and transit are ours. A border problem does not turn into a conversation between two suppliers.
Enquiries, documents and terminal calls are handled in English, Turkish and Russian.
If you would rather sell the cargo than ship it, the desk will price it.
Route, cargo, tonnage and the month you need it in. That is enough for a first indication.