It is likely that during your negotiations with your foreign buyers that you will need to revise your export costings and price to meet their expectations. The world marketplace is a very competitive place and no matter how price-competitive you think you are, you are almost certain to find other suppliers with keener prices that you will be asked to match or beat! This will rquire you revisiting the costing exercise that you did as part of step 8 and trying to find cost items that you can remove or reduce. This is not always easy. It may require you to:

  • Find alternative suppliers (maybe even importing from overseas)
  • Renegotiate better prices and better terms from your existing suppliers
  • Redesign your product to require fewer or cheaper components
  • Redesign your manufacturing process to speed up production and to lower unit cost
  • Change your packaging to reduce cost
  • Reduce the number of intermediaries in the distribution channel
  • Renegotiate lower mark-ups with these intermediaries
  • Consider assemblying your product in the foreign marketplace to reduce cost
  • Consider manaufacturing the product overseas, rather than at home
  • Reclassify the product so that it incurs a lower import duty
  • Find lower-cost transportation
  • Consider alternative pricing strategies
  • Accept lower profit margins

In this section, you will be required to: