Missouri Printing Press Maker Cracks Brazil Market Ex-Im Bank Financing Helps Clinch Deal
Armed with cutting-edge equipment, dynamic marketing strategies and an Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank) medium-term loan guarantee, a St. Louis, Missouri company is breaking into the enormous Brazilian market. Allied Gear & Machine Co. is selling a $665,870 flexographic printing press using water-based inks to Formaset Industrial LTDA, a small private sector company located in Sera in Brazil`s Espiritu Santo State.
Brazil is a market of great potential, but we had not done a lot of business there, said Allied Gear Chairman and CEO Kenneth B. Schaefer. But this year we`ve seen a dramatic pickup in activity. We`ve completed two transactions and have two others in process. Ex-Im Bank`s participation was extremely favorable to our ability to obtain this business.
About 50 percent of Allied Gear`s business involves exports to markets worldwide. The company has 128 employees.
The Formaset contract, financed by an Ex-Im Bank-guaranteed medium-term loan from First National Bank of New England (FNBNE), Hartford, CT., comes on the heels of Allied Gear`s $242,200 sale of printing equipment to another small Brazilian company, Fascreen Artes Graficas, also backed by an Ex-Im Bank-guaranteed FNBNE loan.
Allied Gear`s products are very good and well known, and the company has a dynamic representative in Brazil, said Sam N. Paul, FNBNE vice president, international division. But for Brazilian buyers of U.S. goods, especially small businesses, the cost of local financing is prohibitive. Ex-Im Bank expertise and financing is the ammunition enabling U.S. companies to compete against foreign suppliers backed by their governments.
FNBNE, which has representatives in strategic emerging markets, first came into contact with Allied Gear through an Allied Gear representative in Brazil, where the company participates in conferences and trade shows and demonstrates its equipment to Brazilian buyers.
Formaset will use the printing press to enhance product quality and increase production in providing customized printing services, primarily printing and converting scratch-off lottery tickets and paper board packaging products, in addition to continuous form printed materials and commercial paper rolls such as register tapes.
Over the past five years, Ex-Im Bank helped 106 Missouri companies in 36 communities export $380 million, sustaining an estimated 5,512 jobs. Nearly half of the transactions supported small businesses and 16 deals were in St. Louis. In fiscal year 1998, Ex-Im Bank authorized $353 million in financing in support of U.S. exports to Brazil.
Ex-Im Bank is an independent federal government agency that promotes and assists in financing the sales of U.S. goods and services to markets worldwide. In fiscal year 1998, Ex-Im Bank helped to finance nearly $13 billion in U.S. exports.