Korg Forums

[xmlguy]

It can be in the best interests of distributors to not disclose prices soon on high ticket price items when currency exchange rates fluctuate. The Euro/Yen has fluctuated by 7% in 60 days. That's 150-200 Euros since NAMM for the Kronos retail price range. With the uncertainty of delivery time and the rates due to the Japanese crisis, you might not see much interest by distributors to release pricing until they receive stock that they can sell, having a known cost of goods to calculate their margin. If the Yen is currently weak vs. the Euro, they stand to lose a lot if it strengthens by the time they conduct the transaction.

[jimknopf]

But currencies fluctuate in relation to each other, including the dollar, don't they? The Dollar-Yen relation might change during the same time until delivery.
So what's the difference?

[xmlguy]

There's a lot of factors that could be different between the distributors that allow some to publish pricing sooner than others. They could hedge their prices by transferring currency to Yen in advance to peg their preorders to a specific exchange rate. There's a number of cash flow decisions that could hedge against the currency risk, depending on how the distributor handles the transactions between various kinds of cash accounts. A larger distributor may have much more capital to make these moves than smaller ones that handle smaller regions than the whole US market.