{"id":76860,"date":"2018-04-26T16:09:11","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T23:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=76860"},"modified":"2018-04-26T16:09:11","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T23:09:11","slug":"sri-lankan-rupee-depreciation-why-worry-too-much-should-we-prepare-to-face-rs-200-per-usd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/04\/26\/sri-lankan-rupee-depreciation-why-worry-too-much-should-we-prepare-to-face-rs-200-per-usd\/","title":{"rendered":"SRI LANKAN RUPEE DEPRECIATION \u2013 WHY WORRY TOO MUCH? SHOULD WE PREPARE TO FACE\u00a0 Rs 200 per USD?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><strong>By M D P DISSANAYAKE<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>To win the election, wages have been increased by Rs10,000.\u00a0 How these costs be absorbed, without increasing productivity.\u00a0 The Central Bank robbery is directly impacting on Rupee depreciation.\u00a0 Direct Foreign Investments are rapidly declining, export revenue deteriorating, to pay foreign debts Sri Lanka is faced to buy USD using its Rupee Reserves. \u00a0\u00a0<strong>The Sri Lankan rupee is under constant pressure, meddling inside the country with our own currency alone, we cannot survive.\u00a0 Sri Lanka in effect has failed to optimise the benefits of open market economy.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Rapid depreciation of rupee is a concern, but it\u00a0 should also be seen as an opportunity to increase export revenue.\u00a0 The capacity utilization of plant and machinery at many factories are below 55%, a deliberate attempt to control volume, to keep higher selling price, as support for export marketing is not aggressively pursued.\u00a0 Instead, innovative export marketing drive must be initiated to increase plant and machinery utilization, increasing labour force, reducing unit cost of production and exporting the additional volume.\u00a0 Sri Lankan products are still not available in international markets, except Dilmah Tea, Biscuits.\u00a0 Most of our products are confined to Spice Centre, which are not visited by other nationalities.\u00a0 Asian aisles in super markets are full of Indian, Singapore, Malaysian, Bangladesh, Vietnam products.<\/p>\n<p>In Indonesia, some years ago, Indonesian Rupiah depreciated from Rp7,000 to Rp 20,000 per unit of USD.\u00a0 This was an overnight depreciation.\u00a0 The chinese businessmen opened up their factories previously shut down or operating below capacity. Hired more labour and structured the company\u00a0 business from local market orientation to international market.\u00a0 When export revenues are collected in USD, the companies need not buy USD from Central Bank, instead use their own multi-currency to import machinery, materials, spare parts to replace or expand the business.\u00a0 The local Rupee will therefore be used to pay wages, utilities and other local costs, which can be financed from the Local Sales.\u00a0 To be successful, especially at times of currency depreciation, each Company must derive at least 60% sales revenue from export market leaving 40% for local market. The re-arrangement of core-business require talents of Leadership.<\/p>\n<p>Our Commercial Attache in Sri Lankan Embassaies\/High Commission Offices, unfortunately not exploring these avenues, in their respective stations. Sri Lanka is very under-rated in terms of marketing their goods and services.\u00a0 Even Bangladesh is now well ahead of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By M D P DISSANAYAKE To win the election, wages have been increased by Rs10,000.\u00a0 How these costs be absorbed, without increasing productivity.\u00a0 The Central Bank robbery is directly impacting on Rupee depreciation.\u00a0 Direct Foreign Investments are rapidly declining, export revenue deteriorating, to pay foreign debts Sri Lanka is faced to buy USD using its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-m-d-p-dissanayake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}