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Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

"The drastic fall of Sterling, as well as the uncertainty over future trading arrangements with the European Union, have increased both present costs and future risks for the firm. This has made it increasingly hard to win contracts outside of the UK."

At the end of the day businesses have higher costs or are leaving the UK because of Brexit.

There's no point denying the reality. Nobody can argue that right at this moment Brexit is driving business success.

Bank of America spent $400 million to relocate from UK to Ireland. [1] for example. And they're not coming back.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/b9d43bba-2f7...

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Don’t take everything at face value: a fall in Sterling necessarily means that an exporters products are cheaper overseas, so should boost sales. Unless their costs were already higher than their revenues, in which case they were doomed anyway. The reason brexit will be bad for exporters is the possible future imposition of tariffs. This hasn’t happened yet, so actually in the short term brexit is relatively good for them. Just to be clear I’m against brexit, however in this case blaming brexit for the failure is wrong.

This hasn’t happened yet, so actually in the short term brexit is relatively good for them.

Except that isn't born out by the figures, UK manufacturing is weakening at the moment. The pound might be delivering higher profits on foreign trade but it isn't delivering more orders yet.

Yes, but equally it means that imports are more expensive. We can interpret the statement as implying that the company imports a lot of parts, etc. Let's remember that Ireland uses the Euro so they just need to import from across the border to feel the pinch.

If their finished product costs less than its constituent parts, they're kind of doing manufacturing wrong.

This manufacturer is in Northern Ireland, so they can use Euros if they want anyway. And current plans are for a frictionless border. The argument as Brexit causing it to close is silly, its grossly mismanaged.

>At the end of the day businesses have higher costs or are leaving the UK because of Brexit.

Though I personally (and not being involved in it directly or indirectly) think Brexit is essentially a "stupid" move by the UK, I don't think that it - in itself - should cause any particularly dramatic change, after all the world worked fine even before the European Economic Community and the consequent easyness in import/export within the EU.

Surely there will be some changes in procedures and probably some added bureaucracy but nothing that cannot be taken care of.

From experience, in the '70's and '80's exporting from Italy to the UK involved having a "special" status as "registered exporter" at the Ministry and filling a number of Customs and Bank forms (only for the record and as a curiosity, some of these forms were needed in some 10 copies and at the time the "most powerful" electric typewriter we had available could make at the most 6 or 7 carbon copies, so each form was typed twice).

I have the feling that Brexit is used as a sort of scapegoat or that linking it directly to the bad results of companies (most probably due to a number of different reasons) is a way to attempt influencing the people to be against it.

The most recent round of proposals involved filling in customs forms for moving goods within the UK (to Northern Ireland). Not only is it a cost, but it's an uncertain one that's impossible to properly prepare for. Especially when the government keeps threatening "no deal".

> Bank of America spent $400 million to relocate from UK to Ireland. [1] for example. And they're not coming back.

I had no idea Bank of America closed its Canary Wharf London office and will "never come back" from Ireland.

They haven't closed it. My friend works for them in the City.

These banks aren't going anywhere.

they didn't go thru with it. like most other banks, they were in fact waiting for handouts. some countries were actually hoodwinked into giving them.

they're currently hiring all across the world, including the UK: https://careers.bankofamerica.com/search-jobs.aspx?c=&r=emea

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

Says they completed it in December with 125 job moves. They don't need to fire everyone in the UK to change where their money moves.

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