Mexico City — Brazilian industrial chillers manufacturer Mecalor Solutions in Thermal Engineering Ltda. plans to establish a parts warehouse, sales and servicing center in Mexico within a year as it continues to finetune its Latin American business strategy.
As recently as 2004, when Mecalor sold its first piece of equipment in Mexico, "we didn't have an export mentality," said Flavio Ricardo Pereira, the company's export manager, at Plastimagen México.
But in 2010, when he joined the São Paulo company for the second time, "we decided to make a strategic plan to expand into Latin America," which today is at the forefront of Mecalor's export push.
"We have Mecalor equipment in at least 50 countries, but we are now focused on Latin America," he said.
According to Pereira, in 2010 the company's Latin American sales outside Brazil were small. "This year, 20 percent of our global sales will be in Latin America" — outside Brazil.
"The potential of the Mexican market is very big," he said. "We don't sell [in Mexico] what we sell in Brazil, but we sell at least half of that."
The private company, which Hungarian Sandor Szego founded in 1960 and employs 170 today, has a sales representative in Mexico. It will probably open its planned facility in the city of Querétaro, 135 miles northwest of Mexico City, Pereira said.
Mecalor was one of 11 Brazilian companies on the Brazil pavilion at Plastimagen, where Marco Antonio Carlotti, promotion commercial manager of the powerful Brazilian Machinery and Equipment Association, said that ABIMAQ is encouraging Brazilian companies to export more and to take advantage of doubts over the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In 2017, ABIMAQ and an organizing committee of plastics-related manufacturers organized the first independent plastics trade fair in Brazil, Plástico Brasil, at a new exhibition center in São Paulo.
"We have a new way of looking at the world," Carlotti said. The next Plástico Brasil will be held in 2019.
Abimaq, which set up the Brazil pavilion thanks to funding from trade and investment promotion agency Apex-Brasil, has 1,500 member companies, of which about 90 supply the plastics industry.
