You are Valeria Montiel-Arze, chief executive of Huertos Velandria, a mango grower and exporter in the Republic of Costaria. In six months the peso has climbed from CO$ 5.00 to CO$ 4.00 per US dollar, and almost everything you sell is priced in dollars. The board meets on Thursday and wants your answer for the quarter that opens now.
The situation
Monday, 13 April 2026. The country's largest daily celebrates the strong peso on its front page, and your taxi driver tells you imported goods are finally cheaper. Huertos Velandria employs 140 people, owns 180 hectares of orchard, buys from about 60 contract growers and ships roughly 6,200 tonnes of mangoes a season, most of it to US supermarkets that can buy the same fruit from Mexico, Peru or Brazil.
By 08:30 your CFO, Tomás Echeverri-Luna, has the arithmetic on one page. The anchor contract, USD 1,000,000 a quarter, used to convert to CO$ 5,000,000; now it converts to CO$ 4,000,000. Local costs paid in pesos (wages, cardboard, domestic trucking, the land lease) stay at CO$ 2,898,500. Imported inputs (diesel, fertiliser, refrigerated containers, software), USD 355,300, now cost CO$ 1,421,200 instead of CO$ 1,776,500. A quarter that earned CO$ 325,000 will lose CO$ 319,700. The company holds CO$ 5,000,000 in cash.
For this quarter you have four levers. You can raise the dollar price to the importers by up to 15%, though your head of export sales, Rafael Quintanar-Bello, warns that two buyers have already mentioned Peruvian fruit. You can cut local costs by up to 5%, leaning on the growers who supply a third of your fruit. You can mechanise a packing line for CO$ 900,000, saving CO$ 60,000 a quarter in wages. Or you can move up to half the order book to European buyers who pay in euros, a currency that has fallen less against the peso, at the price of certification, listing fees and new logistics.
The board will judge your plan on a single figure: cumulative profit over the next three quarters, whichever way the peso goes next.