Strategic Industry Expert

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 700 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland and beyond.

The Strategic Industry Expert (SIE) is a senior role for a recognised market expert who works with Fastmarkets’ largest forest products customers. The SIE will have an overall responsibility to driving a market informed growth strategy and elevating our positioning with some of our largest customers. The role also links them with our commercial, editorial and analytics teams.

This role is part of Fastmarkets’ Strategic Industry Expertise (SIE) team, a central team that works across our whole customer base. SIEs work with the most senior stakeholders/C-suite at our largest customers as market experts and thought partners, and help those customers get more out of Fastmarkets in the decisions that matter most to their business.

The Americas role covers pulp, paper, packaging, tissue, recovered paper and wood products across North and Latin America. The focus is the Americas, but you will also support global customers, working with SIE and commercial colleagues in EMEA and APAC. The role needs someone with deep knowledge of these markets, a strong network in the region, and the credibility to hold a market conversation with a CEO or other senior stakeholders in customer organisations.

The Americas are central to global forest products. North America is the largest containerboard and softwood lumber market in the world, while Brazil and Chile have the world’s lowest-cost hardwood pulp capacity, which sets the pace for global market pulp supply. Fastmarkets prices are the benchmarks behind billions of dollars of pulp, paper, packaging and wood products contracts in the region. These markets are changing quickly. The SIE needs to understand these changes in detail, because they shape what customers need from Fastmarkets.

You will work with customers across the value chain, including pulp, paper, packaging and wood producers; converters; packaging buyers at large consumer goods, food and retail companies; home improvement retailers and lumber dealers; traders; and banks and investors. You will build a clear picture of each customer group’s strategic objectives and challenges and how the Fastmarkets’ offering portfolio can help address those objectives and challenges – these span across purchasing, sales, planning and risk decisions. You will engage with customers in many different ways, from C-suite meetings and strategy workshops to presentations, regional roadshows and speaking at industry conferences.

The ideal candidate will be a recognised market expert (from a PRA, or other well known market intelligence providers in forest products, or leading industry players in forest products), who also has a good understanding of Fastmarkets offerings and has a good network in the market.

This is a senior role and requires the candidate to drive our positioning in the external market. You will be joining a highly influential SIE team that sits at the heart of our growth strategy.

Key Responsibilities:

• Support the growth of Fastmarkets in key forest products customer segments (pulp, paper, packaging and wood products) across North and Latin America. These include, but are not limited to, forest producers, downstream customers for whom packaging or wood products are critical, traders, and banks and financial institutions. You will also support global customers with operations in the Americas and other regions.

• Own and present in-depth strategic insights to senior stakeholders and decision makers in customer organizations, positioned as authoritative Fastmarkets points of view (PoVs), and show how Fastmarkets’ solutions meet specific customer objectives. This includes C-suite meetings, presentations, roadshows and industry events.

• Drive significant revenue growth by identifying opportunities to expand our business through:

• supporting successful commercial wins with key existing customers in the Americas, by adding value through targeted engagement and by embedding our products and services more deeply in their workflows

• expanding our value proposition with customers to create new opportunities across our wider suite of analytical offerings in pulp, paper, packaging and wood products

• Collaborate with Account Managers and Commercial teams to drive revenue growth, act as value owner for high-value renewals, and help run the Forest pricing…