Larry Lazin checks his computer regularly to see how the dollar is doing on the currency exchanges of London, New York and Tokyo. Every week, he calls his currency trader in California from hisoffice in a New York suburb to buy euros, capitalizing on the later West Coast closing to search all day and into the evening for the best deal.

Lazin is not a banker, a hedge-fund manager or a day trader speculating from his spare room. He sells lighting fixtures to architects and interior designers, and like a lot of small-business owners, he has become painfully aware of how the dollar’s weakness affects his bottom line.

Since hitting its lowest point in November 2000, the euro has shot up by more than 50 percent against the dollar, effectively raising the prices that American businesses pay for European goods from Portuguese cork and French oak barrels to English antiques or Italian machine tools.

Similar price gains have occurred in the currencies of some other major U.S. trading partners, notably Canada and Britain. And with domestic inflation low, American businesses find it difficult to pass along the extra cost increases to their customers.

For small little companies like us, that is a hard quest, Lazin said by telephone from his business, Global Lighting, in Irvington, New York. You can’t raise prices as much or as often as you need to.

He figured that his profit would fall at least 10 percent this year, even after raising prices.

Small businesses that export their goods, meanwhile, are benefiting almost as much as importers are suffering because the dollar’s weakness tends to make their goods significantly cheaper and more competitive abroad. That presents an opportunity not seen for decades, said Harvey Bronstein, senior international economist at the Small Business Administration.

It’s a great time to be an exporter, Bronstein said in a telephone interview. If you’re an exporter to Canada or Europe, he said, you can sell goods at a 40 percent discount without taking a hit on your profit.

More than 212,000 U.S. small businesses, companies with fewer than 100 employees, exported goods in 2001, the latest year for which the Commerce Department has data. A further 18,000 medium- size companies, with 100 to 500 employees, also sent products abroad that year. Together, they accounted for $182 billion in trade, or 29 percent of the country’s exports.

There are no comparable figures on importers, said Howard Schreier of the Office of Trade and Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department.

The change has become more acute since last summer, with the euro, the pound, the yen and the Canadian dollar all posting double- digit gains against the dollar since July. The cost of imports from China, the United States’ fastest-growing trading partner, has not risen significantly because Beijing pegs its currency, the yuan, to the dollar. But that exchange parity itself has added to the pain of some American small-business owners who import goods from Europe and elsewhere that compete with Chinese-made products.

Lazin, who imports lamps and other lighting fixtures from three companies in Spain and one in Italy, said that he had not postponed paying his suppliers but that he had had to innovate and act fast to keep his company profitable.

Like many small-business owners importing from Europe, Lazin made some assumptions about what the euro would be worth against the dollar after the European Union introduced the currency in 1999. Soon after the EU began using the euro in banking transactions, its value against the dollar fell, padding the profits of small exporters like Lazin.

Lazin has also developed his own approach to reducing his risk. Once a week, he buys a small fraction of the total amount of euros he estimates he will need during the year. It is a form of cost averaging, of spreading out the risk of a price move in either direction.

The strategy has not completely insulated him from the weak dollar, he said, but it makes it very easy at the end of the year to see what your costs were. That, he added, has helped him plan better and take a longer view of his business.

In importing, he said, you have to look at how you do over three years because there is too much movement in the currency.

Larry Lazin checks his computer regularly to see how the dollar is doing on the currency exchanges of London, New York and Tokyo. Every week, he calls his currency trader in California from hisoffice in a New York suburb to buy euros, capitalizing on the later West Coast closing to search all day and into the evening for the best deal.

Lazin is not a banker, a hedge-fund manager or a day trader speculating from his spare room. He sells lighting fixtures to architects and interior designers, and like a lot of small-business owners, he has become painfully aware of how the dollar’s weakness affects his bottom line.

Since hitting its lowest point in November 2000, the euro has shot up by more than 50 percent against the dollar, effectively raising the prices that American businesses pay for European goods from Portuguese cork and French oak barrels to English antiques or Italian machine tools.

Similar price gains have occurred in the currencies of some other major U.S. trading partners, notably Canada and Britain. And with domestic inflation low, American businesses find it difficult to pass along the extra cost increases to their customers.

For small little companies like us, that is a hard quest, Lazin said by telephone from his business, Global Lighting, in Irvington, New York. You can’t raise prices as much or as often as you need to.

He figured that his profit would fall at least 10 percent this year, even after raising prices.

Small businesses that export their goods, meanwhile, are benefiting almost as much as importers are suffering because the dollar’s weakness tends to make their goods significantly cheaper and more competitive abroad. That presents an opportunity not seen for decades, said Harvey Bronstein, senior international economist at the Small Business Administration.

It’s a great time to be an exporter, Bronstein said in a telephone interview. If you’re an exporter to Canada or Europe, he said, you can sell goods at a 40 percent discount without taking a hit on your profit.

More than 212,000 U.S. small businesses, companies with fewer than 100 employees, exported goods in 2001, the latest year for which the Commerce Department has data. A further 18,000 medium- size companies, with 100 to 500 employees, also sent products abroad that year. Together, they accounted for $182 billion in trade, or 29 percent of the country’s exports.

There are no comparable figures on importers, said Howard Schreier of the Office of Trade and Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department.

The change has become more acute since last summer, with the euro, the pound, the yen and the Canadian dollar all posting double- digit gains against the dollar since July. The cost of imports from China, the United States’ fastest-growing trading partner, has not risen significantly because Beijing pegs its currency, the yuan, to the dollar. But that exchange parity itself has added to the pain of some American small-business owners who import goods from Europe and elsewhere that compete with Chinese-made products.

Lazin, who imports lamps and other lighting fixtures from three companies in Spain and one in Italy, said that he had not postponed paying his suppliers but that he had had to innovate and act fast to keep his company profitable.

Like many small-business owners importing from Europe, Lazin made some assumptions about what the euro would be worth against the dollar after the European Union introduced the currency in 1999. Soon after the EU began using the euro in banking transactions, its value against the dollar fell, padding the profits of small exporters like Lazin.

Lazin has also developed his own approach to reducing his risk. Once a week, he buys a small fraction of the total amount of euros he estimates he will need during the year. It is a form of cost averaging, of spreading out the risk of a price move in either direction.

The strategy has not completely insulated him from the weak dollar, he said, but it makes it very easy at the end of the year to see what your costs were. That, he added, has helped him plan better and take a longer view of his business.

In importing, he said, you have to look at how you do over three years because there is too much movement in the currency.