Export Department

Course Contents

1. The export department
2. Functions and organization of the export department
3. The Export Manager
4. Conclusions

Objectives:
In this Learning Unit you will learn how to set up and run an export department. We will also discuss the functions and goals of the export department.

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This will be achieved by :

• Examining the characteristics of an export manager.
• Outlining the most important functions of an export department.
• Analyzing the goals of the export department and how to benchmark them.
• Detailing how to best support the work of the export department.

Learning Unit Summary

Every company wishing to consolidate its export activity has to create its own foreign trade department so it can handle the different tasks that enable its continued presence in international markets. As sales are solely the result of a marketing policy, the export department might be described as an instrument that carries out all the tasks generated by international marketing policies of the company. The export department has very definite goals: to perform all tasks related to international sales.

Upon analyzing the export activities of the companies that have experienced stable growth in their exports, one observes that, historically, their international contacts started out sporadically and only later started to consolidate. That was when they made the decision to expand their the international trading staff to penetrate other markets to a greater extent and better.

When interviewing companies with consolidated foreign departments, we discover that their reasons for creating the export structures have nothing to do with academic reasoning, instead the reasons were:
· Excess production.
· Given the high stocks, the need to increase sales quickly, at all costs.
This in turn resulted from insufficient penetration of the domestic market, product quality problems, pricing, even distribution problems or lack of promotion. We note that companies which are large in terms of their sales, number of employees, or own resources, export greater volumes of goods. There are many common elements in the paths taken by various companies to create an Export Department.