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• 23 Oct

  UK Imports Growing

  HMRC Overseas Trade statistics show imports to the UK growing again in August 2016, continuing to show growth since 2015 levels. Exports however have continued to show a decline over recent months.

  During August 2016 the value of exports (EU and Non-EU) decreased to £23.3 billion, and imports (EU and Non-EU) increased to £41.4 billion, compared with July 2016. Therefore, the UK is a net importer for August 2016, with imports exceeding exports by £18.0 billion.

  Whether you are an importer or an exporter there are financing options available to help you.

  Import Finance

  If your are bringing goods into the UK, you can get funding to pay your suppliers (whether you are buying to order or to stock). This kind of trade finance, or import finance can help you bridge the funding gap between paying your supplier and getting paid for the goods by your customers. You can either repay the finance yourself or you can leverage your sales invoices to repay it for you. This means taking out factoring finance against your UK sales and using part of the proceeds of those sales to repay the import finance that you used to pay your overseas supplier. In this way, a finance house can handle the whole supplier chain for you, end to end. Using this kind of repayment methodology also means that you don't need to be finacially strong in order to secure the trade finance for your imports.

  Export Factoring

  Exporters on the other hand can access export factoring which will enable them to get funding against unpaid invoices to overseas customers. Factoring also provides a credit control service, to help you collect in unpaid sales invoices. This can be very useful, expecially where you are dealing with customers based in non English speaking countries. We have recently seen a couple of enquiries for export financing and we have funders on our panel that can deal with countries around the world.

   

  By Glenn Blackman