Wednesday, October 22, 2014

What do you understand by foreign exchange management?

What do you understand by foreign exchange management?
Briefly(?)I understand that to be the management of the various currencies where a company operates so as to maximize purchasing power. Suppose you were a student in Paris and when dollars were highly valued (because French people wanted to buy Microsoft software) and they essentially have to buy dollars with their francs to buy from company in the US. But the other thing that makes currency valuable is the interest rate that you can earn in that country in its money. So if banks in the States are paying twice the rate of those in France you want to sell your francs, buy dollars and deposit them in high interest account in the states. So you sell francs when you think their value is going down and buy dollars when you think people will want more dollars and be willing to pay more for themNow imagine my company has operations world wide. How much yen do I need to finance operations in Japan? How many peso's for Mexico etc. And once each country's operations have the right cash I'll put the extra cash in the highest rate of return currency assuming all currencies have the same risk....which they don't so I have to factor that in management decisions too.

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