Mexico’s rise depends upon the proliferation of qualified home grown aerospace industry suppliers.

Industry watchers predict that, by the year 2020, the Mexican aerospace industry will break into the ranks of the world’s ten top producers of parts and technology.

Between now and the end of the present decade, however, the major challenge that will need to be addressed to reach this level of global proficiency will be the lack of a presence of a substantial pool of qualified local aerospace industry suppliers that possess industry quality certifications such as AS9100 and AS9200.

At present, a review of the companies that are among the approximately two hundred and seventy firms that make up the country’s aerospace industry suppliers have their headquarters in countries other than Mexico, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France and Italy. Few of the aerospace industry suppliers located in Mexico are comprised of Mexican capital. The Mexican national companies that do participate in the local industry supply chain, for the most part, are manufacturers whose main expertise is in other industries that have chosen and made the effort to benefit from the surge of aerospace industry manufacturing activity in Mexico in recent years.

Some large international firms such as the Canadian manufacturer, Bombardier, have efforts underway that are specifically geared toward developing local aerospace industry suppliers. Joelle Cournoyer, vice president of Bombardier Mexico, reports that the company has set a goal to “develop twelve to fifteen local aerospace industry suppliers over the course of the next two years.”

Other large companies such as Honeywell and Rolls Royce see the need, and are making proactive efforts. to increase the number of Mexican aerospace industry suppliers that form a part of their respective supply chains. Although much progress still needs to be made, Honeywell has succeeded in boosting the percentage of direct materials that it sources from aerospace industry suppliers in Mexico to twenty percent.

As for Rolls Royce, one of the major suppliers of jet engine turbines in the industry, it demonstrated its commitment to growing the base of aerospace industry suppliers in Mexico by establishing a supply chain office in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico in 2012. The executive vice president of supply chain management  inNorth America for Rolls-Royce, Beverly J. Gaskin, attributed the initiatioin of the new venture in the State of Sonora to the fact that the entity is home to a nearly a third of companies that constitute the Mexican aerospace industry.

Vladimiro de la Mora, president of the Mexican Federation of Aerospace Industry, FEMIA, points out that the two hundred and seventy aerospace firms now located in Mexico employ an approximate aggregate forty-three thousand workers, and that, in 2013, Mexico’s aerospace exporters shipped a total value of US $5 billon of product outside of the borders of the country. This number represented an increase of nine percent (US $5.04 billion) over 2012.

As of now, the top aerospace industry manufacturing countries are the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, China and Russia. In order to break into the echelon of global producers, it is imperative that private business, federal and state governments. and institutions of higher learning pool their resources and efforts for the purpose of improving the domestic supply chain by working jointly to augment the number of aerospace industry suppliers in Mexico.

Read the primary source for this post in its original Spanish at El Financiero.