2006 Was A Good Year For Irish Exporters

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

09 January 2007

The Irish Exporters Association last Thursday released its year end review.

Highlights of the review included that:

• Goods Exports, at EUR 88.5 Billion were unchanged on last year;
• Services Exports, at EUR 53.3 Billion, were up 15.6% on last year;
• Total Exports, at EUR 141.9 Billion, were up 5.5% on last year;
• Foreign-Owned Companies, with EUR 130.0 Billion in Export Sales, were up 5% on last year;
• Irish-Owned Companies, with EUR11.8 Billion Export Sales, were up 10.2% on last year; and
• Services Exporters now account for 37.6% of total exports, and the dramatic rise in services exports continued in 2006, rising to EUR53.3 Billion compared to EUR4.4 Billion in 1995.

These figures for 2006 are expected to place Ireland as the 10th largest services exporter globally.

Major multinationals such as Microsoft, Oracle and more recently Google and E-Bay are driving the sector, but also there has been significant growth from the wide range of Irish owned smaller software companies, who grew exports by 13.3% in 2006.

John Whelan, CEO of the Irish Exporters Association announced at the launch of the review that:

“Services exporters are thriving on the continued rapid growth in global trade which increasingly is driven by service related products such as software, financial derivatives, R&D, education and consultancy."

“However,” he warned “they are not immune to inflationary cost increases above their trading partner norms, or adverse exchange rate fluctuation.”

He went on to state that:

“The increase in R&D activity in companies large and small is giving a very positive push to services exporting." But, he said, more needed to be done to give tax incentives for specific services sector R&D.

Other findings in the IEA review included that:

• Food and Drink exporters had an exceptionally good year, with growth of 8% in food exports and 14% in drink exports;
• Chemicals and Pharmaceutical companies grew their exports by 4.7% to EUR42.2 Billion in 2006; and
• Computer Hardware continued its decline in exports out of Ireland and fell by 6.6% to EUR18.4 Billion in 2000.

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