Gunvor’s net profits fell sharply in management buyout year

LONDON, April 14 (Reuters) – Global commodity trading house Gunvor recorded an 85% drop in net profits in 2025 to $104 million, according to financial results released on Tuesday. 

The sharp drop came during a year when Gunvor employees staged a management buyout to replace former CEO and co-founder Torbjorn Tornqvist.

The net profit figure includes writedowns and other impairments worth a total of $462 million incurred by the new management team, the firm said. 

The buyout saw Gunvor valued at around $5 billion, with Tornqvist providing a loan of more than $4 billion to employees to make the deal happen, Reuters reported in February.

Commodity trading houses including Gunvor grappled with politically driven heightened market volatility last year, adjusting to lower profit margins after the COVID-19 demand recovery and Russia-Ukraine war-associated market dislocations that drove record earnings in 2022-2023.

“Throughout most of 2025, the energy markets remained structurally tight yet politically volatile, whereby trading margins were driven less by fundamental supply and demand imbalances and more by navigating fragmentation, sanctions, and regional dislocations in flows,” Gunvor CEO Gary Pedersen said. 

Pedersen said the company had already made the equivalent of its 2025 gross profit, $1.63 billion, in the first quarter, after what he called a pick-up in “constructive volatility” late last year. 

(Reporting by Robert Harvey in London; Editing by Joe Bavier and Jan Harvey)