Jesus. You’ve made an assumption Tony that’s laughable. You are for a start assuming material cost of imports will automatically be impacted if currency negates. You are also Tony assuming the impact (which won’t exist) exceeds currency benefits from selling vehicles elsewhere at inflated prices due to currency benefits.
You asked a question that’s impossible to answer as it’s preface is wrong - like asking what type of cheese is the moon made of. It’s wrong.
I haven’t made an assumption I’ve made an observation. Metals like most commodities are traded in $USD. The LME (London Metal Exchange) is the world center for trading metals, you go on their website and see what currency they trade in. I’ll give you a clue, it isn’t £GBP. At some point in the process of ingots being smelted, rolled or cast up to final assembly if you’re product is heavily reliant on that product a conversion from $USD to £GBP has to take place. If that conversion is unfavourable to the pound the cost of your raw material/components goes up which has an effect on your production costs.
You see I don’t believe that you’re not clever enough to know that which is why you’re trying to duck the question.
You start going on about profit after the pound crashed which again is irrelevant and again I think you’re clever enough to know why it’s irrelevant. Fact is the companies that buy the raw ingots for processing don’t participate in JIT ordering. They buy when the trading conditions are right and stockpile. We use steel, aluminium, copper, lead, nickel and cadmium products where I work and it was 6 months later that the effects of pound crashing were felt in our supply chain with lead and copper prices going up by around 5% and then another 2 or three times during the first five months of the following year.
You say that the pound crashing makes exports look more attractive and you’re absolutely correct on that. But there’s an irrefutable unavoidable flip side to that. Any goods not traded in £GBP becomes less attractive. There’s no getting away from that. $USD is the worlds most traded in currency in the world. Everything from metals to oil to seeds are traded in dollars. It’s a double edged sword and it swings both ways. You’re clever enough to understand that no matter how hard you try to convince us you aren’t.
I have a mate who’s a buyer for a major cable importer and the bane of his life is trying to guess what the pound will do next against the dollar because in his industry you don’t make profit selling you make it buying.