The results speak for themselves.
Integrity.
With quality grading, weighing, and warehouse receipting carried out at ECX warehouse sites, farmers and rural traders no longer wonder what quality or weight they bring.
Buyers are guaranteed the quality and quantity they paid for.
Zero default.
Trading on the basis of warehouse receipts and buyer pre-trade cash deposits ensures a successful transaction. ECX transfers title and payments between buyers and sellers on the next day after trade.
In over five years of operation, hundreds of thousands of transactions have been conducted without a single payment default, trading order error, or system failure.
A warehouse operation in central Ethiopia.
A young coffee farmer in southern Ethiopia.
Transparency.
To level the playing field, ECX transmits price and trade data in real time to 100 electronic tickers in rural markets, to 1.1 million callers monthly on IVR call-in service, and to 800,000 subscribers on mobile SMS.
This information explosion has allowed 15 million coffee farmers to increase their share of the final price from 38% to 65%, as the margins to middlemen have narrowed.
Efficiency.
ECX trading connects 350 members and 15,000 clients, who traded over 600,000 tons and US$ 1.4 billion in 2012.
More than 2 million farmers are directly engaged in the market through cooperatives who trade in ECX.
Clean and sorted coffee beans.
ECX in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.