Europeans Delay Costly Metric Rules

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February 13, 1998 (9:19 AM EST)

By John Camden,

BRUSSELS -- High-tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic can breathe a sigh of relief this week, after the European Commission decided to delay the launch of costly rules to ban U.S. measurements on products, packaging, and literature.

European Commission officials at a behind-the-scenes meeting in Brussels decided to bow to industry pressure and promised new proposals that would put back by 10 years the European Union's planned switch over to metric-only measures on goods sold within the 15 countries of the EU. That means metric-only measurements on goods will only be introduced in 2010 at the earliest.

Officials said Friday the Commission is now set to unveil proposals to allow the "dual labeling" of products -- in both metric and imperial -- for 10 years longer than planned, to give the United States a chance to begin to use and understand metric measurements.

This follows a frantic lobbying campaign stepped-up at last fall's Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue conference in Rome against the original start date for the metric-only directive of Jan. 1, 2000. Most all sectors of high-tech industry complained that the move would have cost them a fortune, partly because the U.S. is well behind schedule for its own changeover to the metric system.

Stephanie Holmgren of the American Electronics Association's Brussels office said the original ruling would have stopped firms putting both metric and Imperial measures on goods by Jan. 1, 2000. This would have forced European and North American companies to manufacture two different versions of their products: a metric version and an Imperial version, she said. The result would have been massive costs of handling two totally different inventories for the EU and U.S. markets.

"Industry was very worried it would have to carry two lots of stock," Holmgren said. "This was going to be a big problem for the electronics industry, which uses American measurements more than others. For example, the 15-inch monitor would have to be changed into centimeters."

Lobbyists said Friday that the cost the electronics and computer industries would have faced by creating two different versions of product lines would have run into many millions of dollars, though -- like the cost of the millennium bug -- the total cost is tough to work out.

"It is almost impossible to put a cost of handling two lots of measurements, since it would filter down to every level -- from the cost accounting systems in a company to manufacturing, and from packaging to the layout of a distribution center," Holmgren said.

Joseph Putzeys, the European Commission's official in charge of metric measurement, said the delay agreed this week would be America's "last chance" to adapt its measurements without causing industry the same headache in another 10 years' time.

"We must insist the new deadline is met. We will insist in the meantime that global industry and administrations maintain contacts over the next years -- and we will see how these relations develop so they don't just forget it," he said.

The proposals will still need the approval of the majority of the EU's 15 countries and the European Parliament, though most members have already said they will not stand in the Commission's way.