NZ manufacturers need to compete internationally on quality, not price

This was a lesson we learned in the 1990s and it seems that it is a message that needs to be given to manufacturers based on their complaints about the exchange rate causing losses in export income. It is a lesson that manufacturers in Switzerland - which has the world's hardest currency - learned long ago.

The constantly fluctuating $NZ value is great for speculators, but bad for exporters and importers.  However, this can be alleviated to a reasonable extent by forward contracts.

Although it is hard to identify specifically from Statistics NZ data what constitutes manufactured exports in their breakdowns of merchandise trade exports, it is fairly clear that they represent less than 20% of the total in terms of value and thus are a significant, but not fundamentally important part of the economy. For other first world countries that has become in the case in recent decades too - "post-industrial" is the buzz description. Because of economies of scale it is rarely possible to compete with China on price, but high-tech, high-skill, top of the line products offer opportunities.