Applied Data Science Partners

🌏 🌱 IFA Global Markets Conference Day 2 We are grateful to our speakers for all the high quality sessions they’ve brought to the #IFAGlobalMarkets2024 conference. Highlights from Day 2: Richard Ewing (Profercy) kicked off the day with a presentation on the merchant ammonia market, emphasizing changing trade routes and the use of ship-to-ship transfers to support downstream operations. Sophie Mason, (Argus Media) followed with an outlook for urea and highlighted gas supply issues in Egypt, Nigeria, and Iran, along with export restrictions from China and Indonesia, which have affected urea availability over the past two years.  Zooming in on the Chinese market, isaac Zhao 赵磊 (S&P Global Commodity Insights) analyzed the country’s export policies for urea and phosphates and looked into China’s sourcing of potassium chloride (MOP), as well as its low-carbon ammonia projects currently in development despite operational cost challenges. Koyel Choudhury (Ma'aden) noted China's impact on global phosphate supply in Q2 and projected capacity growth lagging behind demand through 2029. In the potash market, with Alexis Maxwell (Bloomberg Intelligence), we saw that Belarus and Russia account for about one third of the potash market, and with sanctions redirecting trade routes, potash supply has improved from 2023 levels. Juan von Gernet (ICL Group) commented on the specialty fertilizer industry and its need for clearer product categorization and data availability in this growing market. Humphrey Knight (CRU) covered China’s dominance of the LxFP sector and how this poses opportunities and challenges for prospective suppliers everywhere. Regionalizing LxFP supply chains has encountered early difficulties, and cost competitiveness for new suppliers will depend heavily on government support.    In the shipping sector, maritime transport is one of the most energy efficient modes of transport, but also a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Hugo Rousse offered a glimpse into his work at AXSMarine, estimating shipping CO2 emissions to foresee the impact of carbon border taxes on fertilizer trades. The final session of the conference included an introductory presentation by Jonathan Davis (Applied Data Science Partners) on the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning models, and the importance of making them interpretable, before a panel discussion ensued between Arthur Anunciação Neto, Guillaume Goudy and Max Roz. Moderated by IFA Market Intelligence Director Laura Cross, the panel discussed challenges in digitalizing information flow, opportunities to optimize configuration, and in-house machine learning models. The rapid development of AI has seen training data grow from 3.7B tokens in 2018 to 1.4T in 2024, and only seems to be growing. IFA is proud to bring these topics to the table.

Huge ADSP welcome to our newest joiners! Aneta Blazyczek MCIPD, SHRM-SCP - HR Business Partner Sylvain Rama - Senior Data Scientist Nicholas Rawitscher Torres - Senior Software Engineer Bogdan Bija - Senior Software Engineer Alberto Montemiglio - Data Scientist Helen Yeung - Data Scientist Really looking forward to working with you all!