Corporate News — Small Business: Small Firms Embrace Hedging — Importers, Travel Agencies Rely on ‘Forward Contracts’ to Manage Currency Risk Hong, Nicole . Wall Street Journal , Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]06 Dec 2012: B.5.
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For small-business owners the most commonly used hedging tool is the “forward contract” which resembles a normal foreign-currency exchange except that the exchange happens in the future and the exchange rate is
adjusted for the interest-rate difference between the two currencies., With all the regulatory and marketing issues
entrepreneurs face “currency risk is just not worth the time and effort to deal with said Jonathan Blum an
entrepreneur in San Francisco, who has spent four years preparing for next month’s launch of Shiso Soy LLC, an
importer of artisanal Japanese soy sauce. FULL TEXT
When Henry Sidel founded his New York-based sake importing company in 2005, $1,000 bought him 125 bottles of
sake from Japan. The same sum now buys just 77 bottles.
The yen has risen 30% since 2005, eating into his profit margins as Japanese sake costs more in dollars. The yen’s
climb hasn’t been easy to predict, either. In the past seven years, a dollar has bought as few as 75 yen and as many
as 124.
Mr. Sidel couldn’t raise prices fast enough to counteract the exchange rate, and his company, Joto Sake LLC, had
monthly losses as large as $10,000 in 2010. Mr. Sidel decided to embrace a new strategy: He would use a formal
currency-hedging strategy to lock in yen rates ahead of sake payments.
Through hedging, Joto Sake has saved as much as $4,000 a month, he estimates.
As volatile exchange rates eat into their profits, more small importers and travel companies are turning to some
form of hedging, a risk-management strategy traditionally used by big multinational companies.
Gary Wool, chief financial officer at 35-employee Preferred Plastics &Packaging Co., in Belleville, N.J., uses forward
contracts to pay for shrink film imported from Ireland. Each month, Preferred Plastics signs a contract with
currency-exchange firm Cambridge Mercantile Group to swap U.S. dollars for 120,000 euros — worth about
$157,000 at current exchange rates — with the exchange happening three months later.
In this way, Mr. Wool knows exactly how much money he needs to set aside to pay his Irish supplier, and the
payment amount is set, no matter how much the euro swings against the dollar over the three months.
