Costs of foreign exchange exposures of European based steel companies

This work investigates the link between the costs of foreign exchange exposures and the functional currency of a company. It uses a sample of six steel companies. All of these firms have their headquarters in Europe. Five companies out of this sample use the Euro as functional currency and one company uses the US Dollar as its base currency. In the first step, the costs of financial hedging of these companies will be displayed as absolute values, as a percentage of revenue and as a percentage of equity. The second step consists of the comparison of these costs as a percentage of revenue and equity between the companies using the Euro as base currency and the US Dollar as functional currency. The goal of this comparison is to ascertain whether the company using the US Dollar as functional currency has lower financial hedging costs than the companies using the Euro as functional currency.