There is a mature mode to avoid price risk in the world, usually through financial derivatives such as futures and options. Financial derivatives such as futures are chosen because they have many advantages: first, futures can be operated in reverse, when enterprises encounter risks, they can avoid risks by shorting, and when they judge that prices may fall, they can make profits by shorting; At the same time, the futures industry has no debt settlement every day, and there is no credit problem; Finally, the futures industry is a leveraged transaction, which will not occupy too much cash flow of enterprises. Everything has two sides, and financial derivatives such as futures are no exception. Although there are obvious advantages in avoiding price risks and business model innovation, there are also disadvantages. Futures is a leveraged transaction, which saves cash and invisibly magnifies the profit and loss by dozens of times. It is a common phenomenon that pure futures speculation loses money.

At the same time, in the process of trading financial derivatives such as futures, risks are easy to get out of control, the most typical of which are "China Aviation Oil Incident" and "China Copper Reserve Incident". The reason for their losses is largely due to the lack of risk control in the process of futures option trading, and at the same time, because futures are leveraged transactions, hedging has become speculative transactions, which eventually caused huge losses to enterprises.

However, foreign enterprises have made remarkable achievements in using financial derivatives such as futures options. For example, in the non-ferrous industry, the main sales customers of Chinese enterprises in African copper mines are commodity giants such as Tok and Glencore. At the same time, most of the copper purchased by domestic copper traders also comes from Tok. In the course of trade, Trafigura purchased materials from China's mines in Africa and sold refined copper to traders in China. Tok bought copper abroad at a high price and then sold it to China at a low price. In this process, Tok is profitable. Because Trafigura used very complicated financial instruments in the whole business process, when the price difference between foreign copper and domestic copper in China was relatively large, Trafigura bought copper abroad and hedged it in LME. When it sells copper to domestic companies, it buys copper on the Shanghai Futures Exchange. When the spread between the two markets became smaller, Trafigura unlocked the futures of the two markets. In the process of this operation, arbitrage operations such as exchange rate and interest rate were added, and Trafigura could make a profit by buying high and selling low. Cargill, an international grain giant, is one of the four largest grain merchants in the world, but Cargill has a steel division in Shanghai, which specializes in buying hot-rolled coils in the Shanghai spot market and selling rebar futures in the futures market, because when the price difference between hot-rolled coils and rebar futures is large, it can reach 600 to 700. For example, Cargill bought 4,000 hot-rolled coils in the spot market, sold more than 3,000, and may finally make a profit in 400 yuan.

The main reason why foreign enterprises can effectively use financial derivatives such as futures to avoid price risks and improve their competitiveness is that institutions such as SunGard, Openlink and Goldman Sachs provide tools and services for foreign enterprises. SunGard is an enterprise that specializes in providing price risk management software tools for commodity enterprises, and its main customers are concentrated in automobile, large steel mills and crude oil industries. SunGard now mainly provides risk management products for the financial positions of banks and other financial systems in China, and has not yet started commodity business. Openlink is also a company that mainly provides commodity price risk management software. Its customers are mainly large international enterprises, and it has not yet started business in China. It is with the help of tools and services provided by professional price risk management institutions that foreign enterprises can achieve remarkable results in price risk management. Foreign companies do not need to make decisions through excel calculations or subjective ideas. Software tools can display the exposure in real time, dynamically monitor the changes in the external market, and thus quickly make decisions on corporate coping strategies!

At present, foreign price risk management service providers have not sold their products on a large scale in China, mainly because there are communication barriers in the implementation process of price risk management products, and it is difficult to investigate the enterprise demand of products. Many commodity price risk management software needs to be customized, and there are big problems in the communication between foreign companies and domestic enterprise personnel, especially basic personnel. Secondly, there are great differences among enterprises in the commodity industry, and the operation process of enterprises is not standardized. The key of enterprise price risk management is pricing opportunity. The pricing time of domestic commodities varies from industry to industry. For example, in the non-ferrous industry, the point price is the main pricing time. Iron and steel enterprises have already set prices when signing contracts, while contracts in the coal industry are more complicated. It takes warehousing as the pricing time, so it is difficult to realize the standardized products of SunGard and openlink in China.

To sum up, the gap between domestic and foreign price risk management is mainly reflected in concepts, methods and tools.