PRESS RELEASE
 
New York 13 October 2020
 
In August 2020, Mercury Resources LLC expanded into The Mercury Group, and incorporated trucking and over the road freight services to its suite of client products.
 
The Mercury Group has combined forces with Brian Kostef and major national asset-based trucking company Beemac Inc. to bring its clients state of the art, end-to-end transportation and logistics services. 
 
Mr. Kostef takes the helm as Managing Director of the new joint-venture - Mercury Transportation Solutions LLC (MTS).  Mr. Kostef is bringing over 25 years of experience to MTS. 
 
“As a veteran owned business with strong partnerships with both Mercury Resources and Beemac Inc., we have a ready-made team of professionals who can resolve almost any client trucking or transportation challenge,” Mr. Kostef said.


Mercury Transportation Solutions, LLC is based in Houston, Texas, and will provide truck freight management services offering integrated logistics and last mile management to industries including oil and gas, fuels, petrochemicals, metals, steel, agriculture, project cargo, machinery and equipment, forest products and raw materials.  The MTS team’s suite of supply chain services stream-line cargo movement for bulk, break-bulk, and liquid commodities and cargoes throughout North America. 
Margo Brock, President of Mercury Resources, LLC, said “we are thrilled to be partnering with Brian on this new venture, and we believe the partnership with Brian and Beemac Inc. can only add efficiencies to our existing suite of client services.”


Mercury Group CEO Anton Posner was eager to add MTS to the Mercury Family. “I’m looking forward to offering a client-focused solution to trucking services in North America alongside the talented Mr. Kostef and Beemac Inc. I am confident Mercury Transportation will be able to offer efficient solutions to clients with some of the most challenging cargoes,” he said.


           “Beemac is incredibly excited to partner with Mercury Resources and Mr. Kostef in this new joint venture—a first of its kind for our company," said Michael Ceravolo, Chief Commercial Officer. "Beemac is a highly capable transportation partner with deep experience in the industries we serve. Bringing together the technology, expertise, knowledge and relationships of these two growing organizations forms a truly unmatched powerhouse of assets and logistics solutions that will be a win-win for all existing and future clients” Ceravolo said.


About Mercury Group: Mercury Group is a collection of companies including Mercury Resources, a global supply chain management firm and consulting company based in New York, and Texas-based MTS that together provide integrated large scale supply chain management including rail freight, barge freight on the river system, global ocean freight, stevedoring, warehousing and survey & inspection services. 


About Brian Kostef: Prior to joining The Mercury Group, Mr. Kostef was Vice President of Trucking Operations and Vice President of Business Development while with MID-SHIP Group, LLC.  Mr. Kostef served as a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps with a discipline in logistics and embarkation. During his time in the Corps, Brian was stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina and deployed to Aviano Air Base, Italy in support of Operations Deny Flight/ Provide Promise.  Brian graduated from Robert Morris University in Moon Twp., PA and holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Degree with a discipline in Logistics Management.

About Beemac Inc.: Founded in 1984 by Richard Macklin, Beemac Inc. began as a small flatbed trucking provider based in Ambridge, PA. Beemac Inc. has since grown to become a multi-modal full-service transportation and logistics solutions provider.  Beemac Inc. offers asset-based trucking, LTL, intermodal, air, ocean, warehousing, material management and specialized hauling services to customers throughout North America. A 100% employee owned organization, Beemac Trucking is the largest industrial focused asset based logistics provider in the United States.

June 2020: Chatting with Mercury Resources CEO Anton Posner on supply-chain impacts of COVID-19

In June 2020, Anton Posner offered AG Metal Miner some additional thoughts on how the industrial supply chain seems to have continued moving at pace despite the pandemic.

“‘If you sat in our organization and we didn’t tell you that there was a pandemic going on, and you were just managing the flow of rail cars, rail freight throughout the continent and barges on the river system and stevedoring operations, you would never know that there was a problem,’ Posner said.”

 

March 2020: A COVID-19 Supply Chain Shock Born in China Is Going Global

In March 2020, Anton Posner sat down with Bloomberg to discuss the impact of Covid-19 on the metals supply chain.

“Anton Posner, chief executive officer of supply-chain management and consulting company Mercury Resources, said the move by General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV to temporarily shut down their U.S. plants will reverberate not only through their suppliers of finished parts but in steel, aluminum and transportation.”

 

April 2020: A Conversation with Anton Posner, CEO of Mercury Resources, on the Supply Chain and COVID-19

In April 2020 Mercury Resources was featured in a Brown Brothers Harriman article about impacts on the Supply Chain and Covid-19.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has notably affected the commodities and logistics sector globally. We recently discussed these implications with Anton Posner, CEO of Mercury Resources.”

 

China Tariff May Spur Copper Rerouting But No Big Deal for Mines

2018-08-03 23:00:00.0 GMT
By Danielle Bochove, Joe Deaux and Susanne Barton (Bloomberg) -- China’s plan to slap tariffs on U.S. shipments of metals, including copper, doesn’t pose a big threat to American producers or global prices, although it may create headaches for traders.

The proposed metal duties are part of a $60 billion escalation in a trade war between the two largest economies announced Friday. Investors took the latest measure in their stride, with mining companies’ shares gaining. Analysts said the tariffs will have minimal impact on global supply and demand, and the largest U.S. copper producer shrugged off the news. Freeport-McMoRan Inc. doesn’t see any “material direct impact,” spokesman Eric Kinneberg said by email. “From time to time, we sell small quantities of concentrates on a spot basis to China but this is very limited.’’ Freeport’s copper concentrate shipments to China come from mines in Peru and Indonesia, he said. The company’s shares gained along with the price of copper.

Copper ore, concentrate and refined cathode from the U.S.will be taxed 25 percent. Nickel, zinc, some precious metals, lithium carbonate and steel products are also on the tariff lists that were disclosed by China on Friday. “Copper is a global market that depends much less on regional trade flows and therefore tariffs in any one region should not have a material impact on the market,” Chris LaFemina, an analyst at Jefferies LLC, said by telephone from New York.

Even if American concentrate is turned away from Chinese smelters because of the tariffs, it could probably be rerouted, Chris Mancini, an analyst at Gabelli & Co, said by email. “Concentrate can typically be sent to various smelters depending on its quality.” The question would be whether trading firms that have off- take agreements with miners would assume responsibility for redirecting metal to buyers elsewhere, Mercury Resources LLC Chief Executive Officer Anton Posner said by telephone. “Also, if I’m a mining company or trader that has been moving concentrates consistently to Asia, if there’s a freeze of those shipments, my problems may be a shortfall of payments under contract with the railroads where they may not meet the tonnage minimums,” he said.

Rio Tinto Group’s Kennecott is also a major U.S. copper operation, although it sells predominantly to North American buyers. Rio’s shares rose in New York. Similarly, none of the cathode Freeport produces in the U.S. is sold in China. A key question is if the tariffs apply to metal shipped directly from the U.S., or if they would also affect shipments that enter China through intermediary countries, Jeremy Sussman, an analyst at Clarksons Platou, said by phone. “It’s too early to speculate that it’s anything other than regulated to mines in the U.S., in which case there shouldn’t be much of an impact,” Sussman said in an emailed response to questions.

China imports about 120,000 metric tons of copper in concentrates from the U.S., which is about 3 percent of China’s total imports, according to Vivienne Lloyd, an analyst at Macquarie Group in London. It’s a larger impact on the U.S., which exported a total of about 237,000 tons in 2017, according to the World Bureau of Metal Statistics. U.S. Census Bureau data show only 70,000 tons shipped directly to China.

“There’s a small amount of trade flows between China and the U.S., but it doesn’t seem to be particularly important with the Chinese market,” Lloyd said. “They probably wouldn’t struggle to find it from an alternate seller.” Tariffs on cathode is more difficult to assess because refined metals tends to move in and out of global warehouses.

“Cathode could have a modest impact on U.S. based companies,” Sussman said. “It really would be too early to signal which ones and ultimately the market is big enough that there would be workarounds and any impact would be temporary.”

--With assistance from Yanping Li, Jack Farchy and Mark Burton.

To contact the reporters on this story: Danielle Bochove in Toronto at dbochove1@bloomberg.net; Joe Deaux in New York at jdeaux@bloomberg.net; Susanne Barton in New York at swalker33@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net Steven Frank