Foreign Exchange Hedging Strategies at General Motors: Transactional and Translational Exposures

GM could perform the same analysis as above but for the major Japanese players: Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. By calculating the increase in profits (or loss) and change in market share for these three companies (adjusted for market growth), GM can estimate the sensitivity of its profits to depreciation (or appreciation) of the Yen.

Hedging is a significant measure of financial risk management. Since the 1970s, the increasing number of powerful companies started to control the risk of the exchange rate, the interest rate and commodity by using financial derivatives. ISDA (2013) based on the Global 500 Annual Report 2012 survey found that 88 percent of companies use foreign exchange derivatives. Modigliani & Miller (1958) believed that if the financial markets were under perfect conditions, for instance, there was no agency costs, asymmetric information, taxes and transaction costs, hedging would not increase the company 's value because investors can hedge by themselves. However, a large number of practical studies have shown that hedging is beneficial

When an input (machinery, components, capital, labor, etc.) is denominated in a foreign currency, the risk exists that an unfavorable exchange rate movement will increase the cost of doing business. When the products are priced and sold in a foreign currency, an adverse exchange rate movement will make the product appear more expensive to consumers, decreasing demand or forcing the company to reduce its own profit margin to maintain lower price levels. For companies with integrated international business systems, an exchange rate shock can literally force them out of business, with their operations experiencing pressures from both cost and profit centers.

General Motors Corporation, the world’s largest automaker, has an extensive global outreach, which places the firm in competition with automakers worldwide, and subjects itself to significant exchange rate exposure. In particular, despite most of its revenues and production being derived from North America, depreciating yen rates pose problems for the firm indirectly through economic exposure. While GM possesses ‘passive’ hedging strategies for balance sheet and income statement exposures, management has not yet quantified or recognized solutions to possible losses from the indirect competitive exposure it now shared with Japanese automakers in the U.S import

There are lots of methods to solve the changes in foreign currency and interest rates issue, however, derivative financial instruments are the major tunes Nike enterprise has used to tackle this issue. Despite the fact that this approach does not wipe out comprehensively the risk of foreign exchange, Nike enterprise still utilize it to minimize or delay the negative consequences. Specifically, the derivative financial instruments comprise embedded derivatives, interest rate swap, and foreign exchange forwards and options contracts (Nike annual report, 2014).

Given the nature of its business, Jaguar is faced with three types of exchange rate exposure (1) Transaction, (2) Translation and (3) Economic . Transaction exposures arise whenever the firm commits (or is contractually obligated) to make or receive a payment at a future date denominated in a foreign currency. Translation exposures arise from accounting based changes in consolidated financial statements caused by a change in exchange rates. In this case we primarily focus on the Economic exposure -also known as Operating exposure or Competitive exposure- of Jaguar.

Then, we took into consideration only a fluctuation of the exchange rate. The scenarios that we analyzed covers different positions of the dollar against the euro: weak dollar (USD 1,48/EUR), stable dollar (USD 1,22/EUR) and strong dollar (USD 1,01/EUR). Different coverage of costs with hedging was also introduced in the analysis. The three main policies are of not hedging, 100% hedging with forward contracts and 100% hedging with options.

3) What goal would you recommend for the firm’s currency risk management program? Why? Based on your goal, what types of exposure should Aspen be measuring?

In September of 2001 General Motors (GM) was faced with a billion dollar exposure to the Canadian dollar. At the time, North America represented approximately three-quarters of GM’s total sales and this large exposure to the CAD could significantly affect GM’s financial results. GM had a passive strategy of hedging 50% of its exposure; this paper explores the impact of hedging 75% of the exposure.

In GM’s case they used a passive hedging policy in which they hedged 50% of all significant foreign exchange exposures arising from cash flows associated with ongoing business. Passive hedging is used by highly risk-averse companies that would like to be completely

Those expenses act as a natural hedge that decreases the total exposure of Aspen to foreign exchange risk. For its revenues and expenses, after “natural hedging”, the overall exposure of Aspen to foreign exchange risk is $9,484,000, with Belgium

2) Minimize the management time and costs dedicated to global FX management – this is as a result of an internal study that determined that the investment of resources in active FX management had not resulted in significant outperformance of passive benchmarks. An active approach was implemented.

Risk management is an activity which integrates recognition of risk, risk assessment, developing strategies to manage it, and mitigation of risk using managerial resources. Some traditional risk managements are focused on risks stemming from physical or legal causes (e.g. natural disasters or fires, accidents, death). Financial risk management, on the other hand, focuses on risks that can be managed using traded financial instruments. Objective of risk management is

• Financial management effort: To minimize the risk of exchange-rate fluctuation and transactions processes of export activity the financial management needs more capacity to cope the major effort

Great Eastern Toys is a company in Hong Kong that exports a huge percent of its total sales to the North American and European markets and hence is exposed to currency risk. Previously, the company was occupied with expanding their business and the company 's management had never given much attention to currency risk until their recent meeting with their banker. The banker pointed out that the depreciation of the European currencies during the previous two years had resulted in a substantial loss of income. The company 's management was indeed convinced that they should begin to devote more time and manage their currency position. In this report, we are going to explore the different options for Great Eastern Toys to hedge