MBA student profits from perestroika

Second-year MBA student Danielle Downing is going places -- Moscow, to be exact. At the age of 26, Downing owns a commodities brokerage firm in Moscow that trades grain and oil throughout the former Soviet Union. After she receives her Masters of Business Administration and Masters of Arts in international relations from the University's Lauder Institute in the spring, Downing plans to move to Moscow for between three and five years in order to run her business first-hand and full-time. After her first year at Wharton, Downing traveled to Moscow to look for a summer internship that would fulfill the Lauder program's requirement to find work in another country. She arrived in Moscow soon after economic reforms began to kick in and just two days after the mayor of Moscow agreed that, according to the new reforms, commodities exchanges were legal. Downing served as the personal assistant to the chairman of the Exchange, with whom she spent the summer putting together a development plan of how the Exchange would evolve and attract members. Downing said that the Exchange is a "central wholesaling network" for oil and grain. As compensation for her work, Downing was given two trading seats on the Exchange. If the Exchange grows, the value of her seats will appreciate as well. To complement her seats, Downing spent the next year setting up her own brokerage firm, which has since become the largest grain trader on the Moscow Commodities Exchange. The firm finds grain in the former Soviet Union and sells it to buyers through the Exchange. The brokerage firm is now "downstreaming into processed products," Downing said. It will be turning wheat into flour to be sold to bakeries. With the recent break-up of the Soviet Union, the major difficulty Downing has encountered has been trade laws between republics. Instead of being able to freely move grain from one republic to another, she must obtain an export license. The break-up of the Soviet Union has not had any real impact on her business yet, Downing said. However, when Ukraine starts to print its own money, she will have to deal with two different kinds of currency, which she says will cause a problem. Downing also said that should any political unrest or war commence, "business will not be as usual." While she is completing her last semster at the University, Downing talks to her 15-person staff for several hours every other day, traveling to Moscow during every school break. Downing speaks Russian -- as well as four other languages -- fluently, which she learned while she attended Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Downing said although she looks forward to running her business hands-on, she added that her life in Moscow will not be as comfortable as in the U.S. "Living is rough in Moscow," she said. "It's not New York, but it comes with the business." While Downing was working for the Exchange, she coordinated a corporate jog. "Most corporations in the Soviet Union don't do corporate runs -- they get together and drink vodka," Downing said, adding that she thought it would be a good idea for them to get together and do something healthy for a change. Lauder Institute co-director Herb Levine said he finds Downing a very interesting student. "She was not an expert in the commodities exchange, so she figured out many things as she went along," Levine said. "She got in at the beginning of something very exciting in the post- Soviet economy and she is going to be an entrepenurial leader there." "She's very energetic, very bright and linguistically very capable," he added. "What she's doing takes some guts, some vision and some knowledge, and she's looking forward from the work she's doing into the future. She's going to go very far."

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