Eric Hansen, CEO of Global Dairy Trade, has announced that he will step down as CEO at the end of December after more than 16 years since establishing GDT.
Eric commented that “GDT is nearing the completion of a major transformation and the time is right for a new leader to stamp their mark on exciting developments available to the company over the coming years. GDT is in a strong position as the leading global platform for trading dairy products and whoever becomes my successor will have my full support.”
Charlie Hyland, Board Chair, commented that "In recent decades, as global dairy markets have become increasingly volatile, GDT has emerged as one of the most significant innovations in the industry. GDT introduced a new level of transparency, empowering companies across the supply chain to navigate this volatility through efficient and transparent trading of dairy products, enabled indexation using GDT benchmarks, and provided the settlement references to enable the development of risk management via the Futures market.
“From its inception to the present day, Eric has led the way, enabling the business to develop from a mere concept into the world's leading trading platform for physical dairy products. As CEO, Eric's leadership, market expertise, integrity, and meticulous attention to detail have been pivotal to the success of GDT.”
CFO Justin Matijasevich will be acting CEO from 1 January 2025 while an international search process is conducted.
About GDT
Global Dairy Trade (GDT) is the world's leading trading platform for core dairy products and supports efficient dairy derivative trading.
The GDT Events auction service is the world’s pre-eminent price discovery platform for globally traded dairy products, bringing together buyers and sellers of dairy ingredients from 70 countries to trade US$2-3 billion annually. GDT’s credible, market-based reference prices play an important role in allowing buyers and sellers to trade with confidence in global and regional dairy markets.
Data generated from the auction process is available through our GDT Insight subscription service to support the global dairy industry and associated financial trading.
About Eric Hansen
Eric developed the concept of Global Dairy Trade in the mid-2000s as part of Fonterra Corporate Finance & Strategy and brought together a team to design and successfully launch the platform in July 2008. As Chief Executive, Eric has led innovations to further develop the business, including bringing in two regulated operators of dairy derivative markets, the European Energy Exchange (EEX) and New Zealand’s Exchange (NZX), as strategic shareholders alongside Fonterra.
Eric's extensive career spans the public and private sectors, with senior roles in central banking, government ministry of finance, economics consulting, venture capital, wholesale electricity market, and the dairy industry. Eric’s roles have had a strong focus on strategy and policy covering the gambit from corporate strategy, finance and capital structure reform, industry governance, pricing incentives and cost allocation, competition and regulatory policy, monetary policy, economic modelling and forecasting, to Crown asset and liability management.
Eric studied economics and mathematics at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Process for enquires:
For all enquiries please contact: Meredith Reeves, General Manager Marketing, +64 22 322 7527 | Meredith.Reeves@globaldairytrade.com.
