Mexico: Mendoza the Builder

“Our outfit developed by doing busi ness with American companies, and their know-how has brushed off onto our shoulders,” says Jose Mendoza Fer nandez, 42, director of Bufete Industri al, Mexico’s leading engineering firm.

He has a point. By borrowing a U.S. en gineering technique of offering clients “total package deals,” Bufete has virtu ally cornered the Mexican engineering market while taking a lot of business away from U.S. competitors. Bufete currently has in the works $206 million in contracts, many of them for U.S.-owned subsidiaries operating south of the border.

Mendoza learned his Yankee savvy at the National University of Mexico, where he supplemented his studies by reading all the U.S. engineering trade magazines he could find. To get some on-the-job training, he took a laborer’s job at night at a caustic-soda plant being constructed by Chemico of New York. There, by his own recollection, he picked the brains of every American technician he could find. It was, he says, a “live opportunity.”

In 1949, a year after graduating cum laude, Mendoza and a fellow student founded Bufete Industrial. “Our first important job,” says Mendoza, “came in 1951, when we engineered, designed and supervised construction of a sodium-sulphate plant in northern Mexico.” Only a few more steps were necessary before Mendoza and his rapidly growing staff were ready to offer their present soup-to-nuts service.

Satisfied Customers. Besides having expert engineering, Bufete stands ready to choose a plant location, procure equipment, materials and accessories to go into the building, construct it and help start the plant operation. The organization will even help clients find financing. Says Mendoza: “All of this is the American concept—and it works.”

So satisfied with Bufete are its U.S. customers that they rely on the firm when considering further expansion in Mexico. Celanese Corp. of America has used Bufete for 26 jobs, Diamond Alkali for seven, Du Pont for 14, and General Motors for two. Among Bufete’s present projects: a $20 million pulp and paper plant for Kimberly-Clark in Veracruz and a $30 million Kodak filmmaking plant at Guadalajara.

For all his many successes in planning for his clients, Mendoza has made one big miscalculation that continues to plague him: he failed to foresee his own company’s growth. As a result, his ten-story Mexico City office building is bulging at the rafters. “When we moved in three years ago,” he says, “we figured it would be adequate for at least five years. Since then we have already taken an entire floor of the office building next door, a house around the corner and an annex near by.”