Businesses Push To Increase Exports

Exporting is the buzz word right now as politicians try to find new ways to kick start the recovery. President Obama has said he wants to see a doubling of U.S. exports within 5 years. Connecticut is doing its best to comply, seeing a more than 16% jump in export activity in the first half of 2010. WNPR’s Harriet Jones reports.

Some Connecticut companies are old hands at selling product overseas.

"Next year we’ll be in business, family-owned company, for 60 years, and for probably the last 15 years we’ve been exporting."

Don Stoltz is a senior executive at J.F. Fredericks Tool Company in Farmington, which employs 55 people. The company makes precision aerospace components for major contractors like Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, and now for overseas clients in Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Japan, Korea, Singapore and elsewhere. He says it's been tremendously helpful to have the expertise and connections afforded by the big players, and J.F. Fredericks itself now has its own European foothold.

"We are fortunate to have a representative over in Norway, a retired executive from one of the companies overseas that we do business with. And so he knows the culture he knows the people and that is a tremendous asset."

Overseas markets are now 40% of J.F. Fredericks’ business. For those just starting out on the export trail, it’s a more daunting prospect, but some companies, in part stimulated by the drop in domestic sales, are taking the plunge without those advantages.

"At first I think it’s just finding a resource within the company to focus on it."

Noel Turner is international sales manager for Data Management in Farmington, which employs 50 people. The company makes building access ID badges with smart technology that allows passes to expire. With at first just a few customers in Canada, they began an exporting push in 2008, and now sell in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Mexico and Malta.

"It’s not just selling your product internationally, but it’s understanding the market you’re selling to and gaining that market intelligence. It’s understanding the rules of shipping and shipping internationally, which is certainly challenging, but we’re doing it."

She says the key for her company is dealing with overseas distributors, rather than trying to find individual customers in foreign markets. Data Management’s export initiative has been supported by the Connecticut office of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which runs training programs and provides expertise on the bureaucracy of selling to foreign markets. District Director Anne Evans.

"Only about 1% of United States companies are exporting. But having said that, what we look at is the companies that can export, those manufacturers, those service providers, and what we want, we want to be at 60 to 70% of those companies exporting."

To meet President Obama’s goal of doubling exports in 5 years, Connecticut companies would have to see a 15% growth in overseas sales in each of those years. But Anne Evans says if that goal can be reached the economic benefits could be startling.

"Nationally if we double our exports it’s about 2 million jobs. In Connecticut that’s 30 to 40 thousand jobs, or a decrease in unemployment by one-and-a-half to two percent."

The department hopes it can persuade cash-strapped small businesses that it’s worth the investment of time and money developing overseas markets for the eventual payback of increased sales.

For WNPR, I'm Harriet Jones.