Exporters to Europe must bite the bullet … and hope

The Eurozone crisis will definitely hit exports to SA’s main market, and is a problem that is not likely to be overcome in the short term, according to Duncan Bonnett of trade consultants, Whitehouse & Associates. “Our exports across the board to Europe will suffer,” he told FTW, “with wine, machinery, equipment, and automotive product exports all being tight.” It all depends on how effective the financial rescue packages being put together in the Eurozone are, but the signs are not good at present. “They’ve been trying this for three or four years,” he said, “but they are effectively injecting money into structures that are faulty, and it will certainly take more than a year to get the latest multi-billion packages together and into place. Bonnet pointed out that Spain, just one of the embattled economies, had been making political mutterings recently, suggesting that they reckoned that their economy would bottom out next year, and then recover. He also suggested that SA exporters who were heavily committed to Europe had little choice but to bite the bullet and hope.