IMPORTED GOODS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26229, 13 August 1946, Page 6

IMPORTED GOODS

PRICE CONTROL REGULATIONS CONSIDERED “ UNECONOMICAL AND INEQyiTABLE” * Attention is drawn in the annual report of the Otago Importers’ and Shippers’ Association, to an aspect of the existing price control regulations which is bearing heavily on importing and shipping organisations. It is in regard to the price control on imported goods, which, says the report, owing to raw material scarcities and higher overseas costs, have considerably advanced in price, as compared with that ruling on September 1, 1939. “ The price control regulations,” states the report, “still insist that the importer must handle these goods on the same money margin of profit as he secured prior to September 1, 1939. Although it may have been then an equitable and satisfactory distributing margin on goods costing much lower prices, at the present time, with prices showing very heavy overseas increases, it is quite uneconomical and inequitable to be expected to distribute goods on the same small money profit. “This in many cases, means that goods can be handled, only at a loss, as general overhead charges of distribution have so heavily increased. The goods thus become unattractive to the importer and tend to become in short supply. It is just here that they can be taken up by some other distributor who had no pre-war imports of such lines, and, therefore, no basic low money margin of profit, and so has some equitable and reasonable margin allowed him on what, to him, is a new line.

“The general tendency of the Government through its price control is to expect the increases in price due to inflation to be borne largely by the distributors,” the report adds. “This should be represented very strongly to the Govenment authority concerned, as being an unfair way of preventing rise in prices, which must, of necessity, accrue under present conditions.”