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Export bonanza a little slow in arriving
BY JANE BUSSEY
Posted on
Mon, Apr. 07, 2008
For Doral
exporter Al Merritt, the magic of the falling dollar was driven home
recently when a Brazilian company asked him for prices on U.S. cables,
connectors and transformers for an electrical grid project in Angola.
While
such goods are not part of his company's product line -- his firm, MD
International, is a medical equipment exporter -- the request
demonstrated how a weak greenback is making U.S. export products cheaper
and more desirable.
''They are asking us to source it in the States now specifically because
of the dollar,'' said Merritt.
While the
growth in U.S. exports to the European Union, for example, is outpacing
the growth in imports from the EU, the weak dollar still hasn't
delivered the significant growth in American exports one might expect.
Despite a
four-year slide in the dollar and a rapid decline last year, the pace of
export growth actually fell slightly in 2007 compared to 2006. Exports
of goods and services grew by 12.1 percent last year, but they grew by
12.7 percent the year before.
Still,
the weak dollar is helping to reduce the country's trade deficit -- but
as much from falling imports as rising exports.
''The
scale of export [growth] that we have seen from 2006 to 2007 is
overrated,'' said Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business
& Industry Council Educational Foundation. ``We have achieved
double-digit export growth many times in the past.''
Tonelson
said that import growth was cut slightly more than half in 2007. ''That
was new and that was what was responsible for bringing the trade deficit
down modestly,'' he said.
Growth in
imports slowed from 10.4 percent in 2006 to 5.9 percent in 2007. Total
exports of goods and services were $1.6 trillion last year; imports were
$2.3 trillion.
Merritt's
business is growing by 25 percent a year, and his biggest export markets
are Brazil and Mexico. But many of the products he sells are outsourced
and that has, in fact, muted the impact of the weak dollar on U.S.
exports.
''We
export medical scales that used to be made in Chicago and now they are
made in China,'' Merritt said.
Another
Miami exporter, Caricap, also is just beginning to see the impact of a
weaker dollar. ''It's a slow process, like a sunflower slowly turning
toward the sun,'' said Christopher Fulton, founder of the firm that
exports piping and fittings.
So far he can trace one project in the Dominican Republic to the lower
dollar. ''We are selling probably half a million dollars worth of valve
and fire hydrants that are made in the United States,'' Fulton said.
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