Power trading across Romania, Hungary and Serbia is increasingly being shaped by the same structural reality: the biggest winners are not the most aggressive proprietary desks, but the companies that control the deepest generation, supply and balancing portfolios. Exchange liquidity remains meaningful across all three markets, but easy directional arbitrage has thinned as regional prices converged and short-term optimisation, congestion management and portfolio hedging have become more important than outright speculation.
In Romania, the strongest commercial position still sits with Hidroelectrica, which reported RON 3.303bn net profit in 2025 despite weaker hydrology, while gross electricity production fell to 12,215GWh. That still leaves it as the country’s most powerful electricity portfolio because it combines low-cost hydro generation, flexibility and large wholesale selling capacity. Alongside it, Electricaremains one of the largest supply-driven trading books in the market, reporting RON 1.219bn net profit for 2025 and 7.3TWh supplied to the retail market, with a total supply market share of 14.73%. OMV Petrom adds a different layer of sophistication, with the Brazi gas-fired plant generating 4.7TWhin 2025 and the group using that output inside a broader gas-and-power optimisation model.
What makes Romania stand out is the depth of its exchange and bilateral market architecture. OPCOMreported 15.7TWh traded on the day-ahead market in 2025, with a base day-ahead price of €108.16/MWh. Beyond spot, Romania also recorded 13.88TWh on the bilateral flex mechanism, 6.58TWh on PC-OTC and 5.45TWh on CM-OTC, showing that the real Romanian market is not just a day-ahead venue but a broad contracting ecosystem where utilities and suppliers can optimise shape, tenor and risk. That is why Romania remains the most liquid and commercially layered of the three markets in this comparison.
In Hungary, the market is even more concentrated around one dominant portfolio house. MVM Groupreported HUF 478bn EBITDA in H1 2025, while the wholesale division sold 19,331GWh of electricity and generated HUF 1,418.6bn in net sales revenue. In its retail and customer relations division, MVM sold another 12,040GWh of electricity in the first half. Those numbers underline that the center of gravity in Hungary is not a fragmented trader universe but a vertically integrated state-backed group controlling procurement, generation-linked optionality, customer books and regional expansion. MVM itself describes MVM Partner as a major player with the largest generation portfolio on the Hungarian market, and its regional presence now extends beyond Hungary into neighboring power and gas markets.
Hungary’s exchange liquidity is also significant, but the available public picture is clearest through monthly HUPX snapshots rather than a single annual market summary. In March 2025, HUPX Spottraded 3,673,686MWh in total, including 2,650GWh on day-ahead, 963GWh on intraday continuous and 60.3GWh on intraday auction, ending the month with 102 DAM, 88 IDC and 57 IDA members. That is a very deep exchange for a market of Hungary’s size, but it does not change the underlying commercial hierarchy: the most successful player is still the one with the broadest portfolio and not necessarily the one with the fastest screen. Independent and smaller listed participants such as ALTEOmatter at the margin, but MVM remains the defining force in Hungarian electricity trading.
In Serbia, the structure is different again, because the exchange has become more relevant, but the market is still more tightly linked to the strategic weight of EPS and a small number of regional trading houses than to a broad field of publicly transparent listed suppliers. The latest fully published EPS consolidated accounts show RSD 442.6bn of revenue from contracts with customers in 2024, with RSD 24.4bn net profit. Those same accounts show RSD 133.9bn from sales of electricity to households, RSD 255.5bn to customers on the open market, RSD 15.6bn to industrial third parties, RSD 3.43bn from exchange sales and RSD 6.89bn from foreign-market electricity sales. In other words, Serbia’s dominant utility is not simply a generator; it is also the country’s central electricity commercial platform.
The strongest non-state regional trading reference tied to Serbia remains EFT Group, which says it is active on 14 European power exchanges and delivers around 18TWh of electricity to customers each year on average. That does not make EFT the dominant Serbian domestic supplier in the way EPS is, but it does make it the clearest example of a Balkans-based independent trading house with genuine regional scale. Serbia’s market therefore sits somewhere between a utility-centered domestic structure and a corridor market where regional traders still find room in cross-border and forward books.
On exchange liquidity, SEEPEX remains much smaller than OPCOM or HUPX, but it is no longer marginal. The official December 2025 monthly report shows 495,637.7MWh traded for the month, with a 12-month average monthly volume of 486,568.51MWh and a 12-month average base price of €108.13/MWh. Annualised, that points to a day-ahead market running at roughly 5.8TWhequivalent, which is still far below Romania’s spot market and below Hungary’s monthly spot depth, but large enough to matter for balancing, pricing and market-coupling readiness. The Energy Community’s Serbia implementation report also notes that SEEPEX operates both day-ahead and intraday markets and that traded volume in 2024 reached around 20% of national electricity consumption, confirming that the exchange is now structurally relevant even if Serbia remains a less transparent commercial market than Romania.
Price convergence is the second big theme tying these three markets together. Average day-ahead prices in 2025 were about €108.17/MWh in Romania, €108.51/MWh in Hungary, and €108.10/MWh in Serbia, according to regional market data. Those are extremely narrow spreads by historical standards. The implication is straightforward: the old model of buying one market and selling another on broad country differentials is no longer where the strongest trading margins sit. Commercial advantage has migrated toward hourly shape trading, congestion, balancing, flexibility monetisation and the ability to manage customer load against volatile renewable output.
That shift helps explain why Romania currently looks like the most complete power trading market in the group. It has the deepest visible liquidity, the broadest mix of exchange and OTC contracting, and several heavyweight commercial actors with disclosed earnings and handled volumes. Hungary has strong exchange depth as well, but the market is more centralized around MVM, making it harder for independent traders to rival the incumbent on absolute scale. Serbia, by contrast, remains the least transparent but arguably the most open to niche value extraction for regional traders, especially where interconnection, balancing needs and legacy bilateral structures still leave room for specialized execution.
Taken together, the ranking by commercial weight is relatively clear. In Romania, the leading trader-portfolios are Hidroelectrica, Electrica and OMV Petrom, with Hidroelectrica strongest on generation-backed optionality and Electrica strongest on supply scale. In Hungary, MVM is the clear market leader by sold electricity, revenue and system position. In Serbia, EPS remains the dominant domestic commercial actor, while EFT stands out as the most visible Serbia-linked regional independent trader. The difference between the three markets is not whether they are liquid enough to trade, but whether liquidity is broad enough to dilute portfolio concentration. Right now, Romania comes closest to that threshold, Hungary remains a national-champion market, and Serbia is still a strategic corridor market where scale and relationships matter as much as exchange access.
