Strong Dollar Makes US Companies Mixed

Vioearth is a small Scottish company with big ambitions to bring its ­“Viosmart” energy efficient power hubs into offices around the US.

But as Duncan McNeill-McCallum, Vioearth’s chief executive, has been contemplating the $500,000 investment needed to launch his US business, he has come up against a new challenge: a strengthening dollar. “It is affecting all of our financial models,” he says.

from the Federal Reserve to rust belt manufacturers and heartland farmers, the dollar’s surge over the past six months has everyone in the US with an international angle to their business contemplating the consequences.

Much of the focus has been on the impact on exporters and trade or US corporates repatriating overseas profits. But there is another way the strong dollar is casting its shadow over US recovery: foreign direct investment, something the administration has made a priority of attracting in recent years.

Mr McNeill-McCallum is one of 1,300 investors landing in Washington for this week’s selec USA Summit, wher they will be courted by everyone from President Barack Obama and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, to state officials.

Launched in 2011, after a panel led by Jeff Immelt, head of General Electric, found the federal government’s existing efforts to lure FDI lacking, selec USA remains a relative newcomer to the world of investment promotion. That is mainly because the job has traditionally been left to state and local governments.

“We’ve not been nearly as good as we should have been at promoting the US as a destination for investment,” says Stefan Selig, a former banker who oversees the effort as US undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade. Despite halfhearted efforts in the past, the US is the country with the biggest stock of FDI, at almost $3tn and growing.

Officials claim selec USA helped add to that. Investors at its first summit in 2013 put their money into projects worth more than $7bn in 28 states. But its share of the global pie fell from more than a third in 2000 to less than a fifth in 2013. Preliminary numbers released last week also showed FDI into the US dipping by 60 per cent in 2014, though largely because of one transaction, Vodafone of the UK’s $130bn sale of its stake in Verizon Wireless of the US.

“Companies around the world are fairly bullish on the US right now. But the big ‘but’ is that self-inflected wounds could deter that,” says Nancy McLernon, president and CEO of the Organization for International Investment, which represents foreign investors in the US. Among those, she argues, is a corporate tax rate that remains 10 percentage points higher than the average among OECD nations.

A US failure to secure many substantive trade agreements in the past two decades has also hurt the country’s competitive proposition, she says, though that is changing with the Obama administration’s push for big Pacific Rim and transatlantic trade pacts.

Amid those sorts of policy debates, the strength in the dollar represents a new conundrum. “The strong dollar is going to impact everything [in the US economy] as it relates to trade and investment,” says Mr Selig. But he argues that investors also see it as a sign of strength. While the strong dollar raises the cost of initial investments, it is the result of a healthy US economy, which has arguably performed better than emerging economies like China, which have attracted huge.

“The currency issue makes it more difficult to invest . . . but you also get access to the market,” he says.

Big investors also argue they are making long-term, strategic investments rather than short-term ones that might be more affected by currency swings.

The Drax Group, which operates a massive power station in the UK that it is converting from coal fuel to sustainable wood pellets, has invested $250m in recent years into production facilities for those pellets in Louisiana and Mississippi and a port facility to ship them out. Its search for locations to establish other plants in the US is not being affected by the dollar at this point, executives say.

“It is one of the issues that we have to deal with obviously,” says David Love, head of regulation and policy at Drax Power. “But these are long-term investments that we are making.”

Mr McNeill-McCallum has come to the same conclusion. He has had to increase initial investments in UK currency terms but he thinks that bet will be repaid in the future via bigger dividends, as long as the dollar stays strong.

“At the end of the day we have a job to do,” he says. “Let’s go out and do the job and do the best we can and then worry about [the dollar] later.” (www.chinainout.com)