March 13, 2008

Whether you know the name Flextronics or not, you use their products everyday. (This was our morning company visit today) Flextronics produces about 60% of the cell phones in the North American Market, 75% of the washer and dryers (GE, Whirlpool, Maytag) and many other consumer goods. This facility was incredible. The business park consisted of 19 building of which about 13 were used by Flextronics. It was really cool to see the entire production line of plastics, and PCBA’s (printed circuit boards) We went from the design, fabrication, and shipping phases. In this facility only about 5% of the products go to the Mexican market, because through NAFTA, Flextronics can produce in Mexico and sell in North America, I love globalization. There were thousands of machines producing thousands of products per minute, it was really incredible.
In the afternoon we visited a company called Maseca, and yet again I did not realize that I used their products everyday. Maseca is the company behind the Mission brand. That’s right all those delicious tortillas and chips that we buy, they all come from the Maseca corporation. This facility produced the corn flour that goes into all of their products. When you get to see the operation it is really quite simple, but they were the first movers in the industry to commercialize tortillas and corn flour, and Maseca has had the advantage ever since by means of scale. During the visit we Jonathan and I kept quoting Nacho Libre, especially the scene when he talks about the “Lords Chips”. Little did we know though that our tour guide Oscar’s nickname was Nacho, or Ignacio. Yeah we didn’t let that one go for the next couple of days. I am pretty sure that he regretted the decision to let that one slip.
We really didn’t do much this evening, Jonathan and I went to Chili’s to get some refillable drinks and bottomless chips and salsa. The mall that we found was quite nice though. We were able to go to the Apple Store in the mall. The Apple store made me giddy for a half hour or so. The mall was just like you would find in the states as well. (We were in the nice part of town)