In the fairy tale “Hans in Luck”, Hans receives a lump of gold the size of his head as a reward for seven years of labour. He exchanges this for a horse ... the horse for a cow ... the cow for a pig ... and so on. We also know bartering from the war, where jewellery and other material goods were exchanged for food and luxury goods on the black market.
Haver & Boecker was reminded of such bartering in the mid-1980s when it came to doing business with Eastern Bloc countries. Payment difficulties and high levels of debt were reported in the media, and credit transactions were no longer covered by the state Hermes credit insurance. If you wanted to sell products from Germany to the Eastern Bloc, the only option was countertrade (compensation). Since smaller companies were usually unable to handle countertrade transactions, they tended to involve specialised traders.
This is what happened to Haver & Boecker when two ROTO-PACKER® Type 8 RC machines were sold to an Eastern Bloc country. Unfortunately, the Eastern Bloc country had no money – so a German company was brought in that was willing to provide almost hundred percent compensation for the deliveries from Oelde. This meant that the company obtained counter-goods from the Eastern Bloc country in exchange for the goods delivered by HB.
It was a long road until the contracts were finalised. The negotiations were at risk of failing on several occasions. But in the end, the two ROTO-PACKER® machines were delivered as agreed and the equivalent value of products were sent to Germany. All’s well that ends well.
