I’d like to send my sincerest thanks to our first poll respondent who not only answered every question, but is allowing me to post the “additional comments.” The following is the entire response from a “very small” company of less than 10 employees:
We held our prices until 3/31/2011. We paid approximately $35,000 in additional duties in those 3 months.
From April 1, we decided to raise our prices as we did not have sufficient margin to absorb this additional duty. This has resulted in a dip in order booking by about 30% compared to 2010 on month-to-month basis.
Our products compete directly with products from China and now the Chinese imports are 6% cheaper than ours because of the additional duty. The weak dollar has made matters even worse as we have lost about 5% due to currency fluctuation in the last 10 weeks. China has artificially managed their currency to be stable which is making our products non-competitive and putting our survival in jeopardy.
Thank you again! Hopefully this is the first of many responses to the poll, which will help us get a better sense of how GSP expiration has impacted various companies.
