Malaysian exporters may have shifted to markets away from Europe to developing and emerging economies, but some companies are still feeling the pinch from the eurozone crisis.

For these exporters, problems of financing, a fall in orders and reduced demand from Europe for their goods have made a negative impact.

Malaysia’s largest carbon steel fastener, Penang-based Chin Well Holdings Bhd, saw its first-quarter performance ended Sept 30, 2012, severely affected by the ongoing eurozone crisis.

Its exports to the eurozone, its largest market, was reduced by 29.3% to RM48.3 million from RM68.3 million in the previous corresponding quarter, reflecting the dampened economic outlook.

The generally lower global demand for fasteners resulted in a lower revenue of RM114.9 million and a net profit of RM4.2 million. For the same period its earnings per share amounted to 1.54 sen compared to 6.17 sen previously.

The euro-area economy has shrunk for two successive quarters and economists foresee a further decline in gross domestic product in the final three months of last year, forcing companies to cut costs by slashing jobs.

The European Central Bank estimates contractions of 0.5% and 0.3% in 2012 and 2013, reports Bloomberg. Unemployment in the 17-nation region rose to a record 11.8% from 11.7% in October, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said on Tuesday. That’s the highest since the data series started in 1995 and in line with the median estimate of 27 economists in a Bloomberg News survey, the news agency reported.

Commenting on the situation facing Malaysian exporters in view of the situation in Europe, OSK Research Sdn Bhd analyst Danny Chan Tzu Chang said there were companies whose profits, even if they were not disastrous, would have been higher if the crisis had not occurred.

A case in point is international oil and gas services provider Bumi Armada Bhd which did not land a single flotation production storage offloading (FPSO) business for the whole of last year.

Chan attributes this to the ongoing crisis in Europe, the absence of which would have allowed Bumi Armada to win more businesses.

Another company that had its share price and warrants battered was KNM Group Bhd.

Its share price dropped as much as 80% of market value over two years from December 2007 to March 2009 as its fortunes were interlinked to the eurozone crisis.

Analysts said earnings from KNM’s core business of manufacturing process equipment and the successful implementation of a project in the UK will influence market perception of the company.

“We believe that KNM’s outlook moving forward is a mixture of positives and negatives,” RHB Research Institute Sdn Bhd analyst Mohd Faisal wrote in a recent research note.

Nearly two years after announcing a RM2.2 billion waste-to-energy project in the UK, it was still unable to provide certainty to the project as its UK partner was having problems securing financing.