2003 - a promising year, but...

摘要

There is a song, a mellow tune, with the line: 'I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The long hot summer just passed me by'. That song strangely sums up the year for us; we've all been terribly, terribly busy, heads down working, then suddenly we look up and say - 'what happened?'Perhaps it was the war in Iraq that created a general atmosphere of nervousness, which stifled development and investment or perhaps it was just a year of entrenchment/consolidation. The year in some ways built very slowly and carefully on early promise.The pound reduced in value against the Euro (it fell by as much as 10% over the year) so the UK market became less attractive to timber exporting countries and our home grown merchants grasped the opportunity to gain market share and improve prices (see Fig 1).