The U.S. Department of Commerce late last month released its long-awaited final tally of 1999 Orange County exports, revealing a heady upturn in trade outflow that year to $9.3 billion,a 14% increase over the 1998 figure.
“Those numbers don’t surprise us,” said Humphrey Chan, director of Asia-Pacific Rim operations for Rainbow Technologies Inc., an Irvine provider of security products for software and Web-based applications. More than half of Rainbow’s total sales are racked up overseas, and that is where company officials have seen their strongest sales growth, according to Chan.
“The top four export markets for OC,Mexico, Canada, Japan and South Korea,all showed solid gross domestic product gains at that time,” said Esmael Adibi, professor and director of Chapman University’s Center for Economic Research in Orange. “So the big export number for 1999 is in line with what we expected to see.”
The historical data also showed OC’s 1998 exports falling 6.8% off the 1997 figure of $8.8 billion, a $0.6-billion drop that was largely a result of the Asian economic crisis.
The latest number, released by the Newport Beach-based OC Export Assistance Center,an arm of the U.S. Commercial Service,is initially only available as an aggregate total. The Commerce Department’s Washington, D.C.-based trade division expects to publish OC export figures broken down by country and industry later this month.
