BERLIN (AP) – For every cent the U.S. dollar drops on currency markets, life gets harder for cuckoo clock makers in Germany’s Black Forest.

Their best customers are Americans enchanted by the hand-carved oak leaves, birds and stags on their creations. But the weakening dollar has boosted the price tag by some 30 percent in dollar terms over the past two years, hurting sales and forcing the 12 small companies that make the clocks to cut production this year by about a third.

“We’ve seen a sharp contraction,” said Ingolf Haas, head of the Black Forest Clock Association and a fourth-generation clockmaker himself. “Three years ago, an American who came to Germany would have paid $400 for a clock and now that same clock costs $550 to $600 only a couple of years later.”

All European exporters have been hurt by the fall of the dollar against the euro, which reached a record dollar high of above $1.32 on Thursday, up from around $1 in November 2002, and up 60 percent from the euro’s low of around 82 cents in 2000.

But it’s small and mid-size companies in particular that feel the pain most directly now, while their larger cousins can blunt currency effects through complex and expensive hedging strategies on financial markets.

Haas’ Rombach & Haas, which he runs with his wife, Conny, employs seven people and has about $130 million in annual revenues. He said family owned clock firms like his – most of them clustered around the small town of Schonach in southwest Germany – make about 300,000 clocks in an average year, with more than half bought by Americans, either in Germany or through import shops in the United States. This year, he reckons, that will fall to about 200,000.

Big businesses can build factories in the United States to dodge the unfavorable exchange rate, or devote employee time to complex foreign exchange deals totaling billions to lock in future exchange rates and insure their earnings against currency fluctuations.

Some of the clock makers are looking for new markets in Asia. “The Asia market for us is still growing,” said Haas. “It’s not what the U.S. market is – it’s still under 5 percent of our production.”

Vincenzo Dieci, owner of prosciutto maker San Nicola Prosciuttificio del Sole in Parma, northern Italy, said the weak dollar has badly damaged his sales. “It has been a real collapse,” he said. “Exports to the United States have decreased by 30 percent, and up to 50 percent in some periods of the year.”

Dieci plans to travel to Japan next week to explore business chances there.

Paris-based online wine retailer 1855.com faces a growing mailbag of complaints from U.S. buyers, who made up about 10 percent of the company’s 10 million euros in revenue last year, said chairman Emeric Sauty. A 40 euro bottle of Bordeaux, for instance, cost $40 two years ago, and $52.80 now.

Accordingly, the share of sales from the United States is falling. But 1855.com’s dollar revenue is not big enough to hedge efficiently. “We don’t want to manage that kind of risk,” Sauty said.

For wine merchant Johannes Selbach, from the Mosel wine district town of Zeltingen in western Germany, the weak euro has meant that his Weingut Selbach-Oster vineyard and other producers were not able to charge more for an outstanding 2003 vintage, which he described as “probably the best in the last 20 years.”

The weak dollar had already pushed up prices by some 20 percent to 25 percent for top German Rieslings in the U.S. market, he said, so most producers decided to forgo reaping the full benefit of a good year and didn’t charge what the vintage might have otherwise merited, he said.

“People put a lot more wine in the bottle in terms of quality for money,” he said. “We can’t take a big gulp from the profit bottle right now, because the dollar is eating into that.”