CA Indosuez (Switzerland) SA Annual Report 2022 30 / Corporate and Investment Banking / The level of use of ITB credit lines as well as the commercial results thus proved very favourable for 2022 and well higher than in 2021 without any credit defaults, thanks to ongoing strong vigilance in terms of risk and close monitoring of our transactions and our direct and indirect counterparties. In the Mining, Metals, Agricultural Products and Energy departments, our sales teams focused on service and support provided to our major clients, while our origination and structuring teams successfully completed high value-added transactions: Borrowing Base, Revolving Credit facilities, back-up facilities, storage financing, etc. In synergy with the Corporate Coverage team, our Trade & Export Finance and Cash Management departments also successfully pursued their development, thanks notably to the reinforcement of their offer in receivables financing and automated payment solutions. With 2022 having ended on a better-than-expected commercial performance for all of our ITB activities, we are now looking to 2023 and the many challenges ahead of us. In the short term, the extent of the upcoming recession in the eurozone and the United States and its impact on global demand for commodities remain difficult to estimate. In an environment in which supply is still very fragile and subject to geopolitical uncertainties, our intention is to be even closer to our clients and monitor market movements more closely, in order to provide support during these periods of significant instability but also many opportunities. The energy transition towards a lower-carbon economy is now well underway, both strategically and structurally, and we aim to play an instrumental role in this. The advent of this economy will generate exponential growth in metal needs, which are essential for the production and storage of renewable energies, with a parallel slowdown and then gradual decline in the consumption of fossil fuels in the countries committed. Camille Sednaoui Head of ITB Switzerland A RECORD YEAR FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE & TRANSACTION BANKING (ITB) After the halt of the global economy in 2020 and the intense disruption linked to the chaotic return of global production and supply chains in 2021, international trade experienced another particularly turbulent year in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the import restrictions and sanctions on counterparties, applied in a less harmonised manner between the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, making their implementation even more complex. This highly disrupted macroeconomic and geopolitical environment once again led to a surge in commodities prices, followed by high volatility, amplified by the underlying inflationary pressure on metals linked to the energy transition (copper, cobalt, Nickel) with a lag and historical fluctuations on some futures markets. More significantly than in 2020 and 2021, price volatility has created favourable business opportunities for the best-anchored international brokerage firms, which form the core of our clients. The international trading activity is a business with short-term flows that consists of meeting the commodities needs, by nature not very compressible, of the global economy and processing industries. Major market disruptions such as those experienced in recent years have reduced the ease of access to these commodities and their financing, highlighting the fundamental role of traders in supply chains. Thanks to their know-how and logistics assets, large brokerage firms, able to adapt to abrupt market changes and the closure of supply sources, again managed to supply the economy with the products essential to its functioning and to generate profit margins as a result.
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