15. 02. 2010
Even though the international crises did not affect this continent like it did Europe and North America, it has always been difficult to sell our highly technologically-equipped heat technology to this continent – this requires a sound knowledge of the local customs and a fair amount of patience. Notwithstanding initial complications, we succeeded in opening further strong markets next to the traditional Brazilian market in Mexico, Peru and Columbia. Apart from that we also have representation offices in smaller countries in Central America, such as Cuba, Costa Rica and Salvador.
Sales activities have unfortunately ceased on some markets due to changes in political climate – an example is Venezuela, a very socialist country otherwise extremely rich in mineral resources. The local but state quota system practically blocks all imports from developed countries and following successfully acquired new sales representation in Caracas several laboratory products continue to remain here in Brno and await Hugo Chavez’s Government to approve foreign allowance for our distributor.
We made a big breakthrough in Chile after a year’s negotiations. This middle-size country is presented as a model country with a developed economy on this continent, nonetheless, the activities of our new partner Merck Chile continued to be hampered by other priorities. It took our detailed analysis of the market environment and very promising statistics of deliveries by laboratory equipment producers to Chile to build-up this partner and to encourage him to include our products in his products portfolio; we gained maximum preferences in November 2009 after very demanding negotiations in Santiago. As proof of our future cooperation, Merck Chile has already ordered first stock equipment and plans to follow in its successful sister company’s, i.e. Merck Peru’s, footsteps – where we sell about 60 laboratory-related products each year.
We made interesting progress in Ecuador. This small little country in the middle of the South American continent is not one of the richest countries, yet the diligence and the efforts of the local population is visible at every corner. They strive to improve their living standard and to measure up to their richer and bigger neighbors. Even though this country does not even have its own currency (its legitimate tender is the U.S. Dollar), we succeeded several years ago in procuring in the capital city of Quito the biggest distributor of laboratory equipment - HR Representaciones. Following several individual installations in previous years, the popularity of our products rocketed to such an extent that HR Representaciones has already placed two orders this year for deliveries on stock – a total of 52 products. Moreover, this distributor organized an extensive workshop in November 2009 for smaller representatives and for key customers focusing on the technology of our laboratory equipment in Hotel Quito in the capital city. About eighty persons enlisted for the workshop and the morning and afternoon courses saw 100% attendance. Live discussions were conducted during breaks with our partner’s dealers and with our company’s representative. The workshop was very demanding both organization-wise and content-wise, nonetheless, thanks to great efforts on the part of our partner and thanks to thorough preparations on our part the workshop met with a good response and we took the liberty to hope that in the years to come we will succeed in leveling and exceeding the sales of our biggest rival in Ecuador.
Over the past critical year also our subsidiary MMMM Medcenter succeeded in generating a very nice sales result and we all believe that the future will bring us continued sales success.