Prior to Sunday, Colombia emerged quietly as a refuge for multinational brands looking for a stable place to make their products in a time of geopolitical and environmental turmoil.
President Trump’s threats to increase invoices in imports from China are forcing companies to reduce their dependence on factories in that country.
Businesses created plants closer to the United States – a trend known as Nearshoring. Mexico had become a popular destination, but Mr Trump’s oath imposing invoices on Mexico imports, he also adds a risk to this strategy.
Colombia, on the other hand, has been safely appeared by Mr Trump’s focus. Since 2018, about $ 7.6 billion in foreign investment has been committed to more than 300 projects in Colombia associated with Nearshoring, according to Procolombia, a government commercial office. US companies make up more than 40 % of all foreign investment – the largest single source.
“Nearshoring is not just a past mania,” said Todd Fagley, chief executive of Medsource Labs, a medical equipment company based on Chanhassen, Minn., Which created a factory in Colombia three years ago. “People will become more difficult to maneuver,” he added.
But Mr Fagley did not foreseen Sunday’s events in the afternoon.
President Trump, angry at his Colombian counterpart to accept incoming US military flights loaded with exported immigrants, said he had slapped 25 percent invoices in all imports from Colombia. A few hours later, the White House said the victory, announcing in a statement that the Colombian government agreed to “unlimited acceptance of all illegal aliens by Colombia”. The invoices will be “held in a reserve”, the statement added.
At the moment, trade could probably continue. But the incident underlined the increasing complexity of international trade, as Mr Trump exerts the threat of invoices as a primary policy.
Mr Fagley, 54, the co -founder of Medsource, was already used to the volatile reconstruction of the global supply chain. A competitive triathlete with an Iron Man under his belt is not one to sit around waiting to see what will happen next. Since the establishment of his company in 2002, using a $ 75,000 mortgage at his wife’s home, he has often revolved around the world in response to changing conditions.
Initially, Medsource was almost exclusively based on factories in China. On his first trip there in the early 2000s, Mr Fagley learned that he could supply medical emergency kits used by paramedics for about one tenth of prices in the United States. As Medsource expanded to other products, it depends on two dozen factories in China for about 95 % of its production.
In 2014, Medsource developed a new type of intravenous tube, assigning a partner factory to the Chinese province of Jiangsu to build it. A few months later, while in a commercial exhibition, Mr Fagley was terrified to detect prototypes for his new product that appears by another Chinese company.
He was drawn to what a copyright was seen, Mr Fagley moved the production of the new device to India.
Two years later, he bought a factory near Bloomington, Ind., To expand his order of intravenous products. He turns the possibilities of marketing to do his goods in the United States, but financial results were another issue.
“We have lost the money every year,” he said, accusing the highest US salaries and the cost of compliance with domestic regulations. Eventually the plant was closed and moved its production to India.
All the time, events are plotting to increase his desire to become less dependent on China. Mr Trump’s first term brought invoices to hundreds of billions of dollars worth Chinese imports. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. proceeded to this policy.
Subsequently, the pandemic appeared in China, stopping the production of basic Medsource products. When Chinese factories reiterated production in late 2020, an increase in factory orders held the shipping industry, sending the prices going up.
Medsource often transports parts from Chinese factories to a factory in Minnesota, where it has collected them in end products. Prior to the pandemic, the shipping of a container from Shanghai to Minneapolis costs an average of $ 4,000. At the beginning of 2021, the same journey reached up to 10 times more.
“This was not a viable future,” Mr Fagley said. “People realized the vulnerabilities of the supply chain.”
As he and his team understood how to react, they settled in the need to move some factory orders closer to the United States. Mr Fagley assumes that Mexico would be a good choice. His team visited Costa Rica, but the workforce was very small. They considered the Dominican Republic.
Then, a Medsource Lebanese partner introduced the company to Elias Daffach Saker, an aspiring businessman who was born and raised in Carthage.
Mr Daffach’s grandfather had arrived in the city, a place of glittering skyscrapers that are over the Spanish colonial -era in a peninsula that was coming to the Caribbean, from its indigenous Syria in the 1930s to test the crop.
Mr Daffach, 55, had worked in the family -run restaurant business and then sales for a company that made syringes. He spoke fluent English, having studied at a Community College in Ohio. In May 2021, he flew to Minneapolis to meet Mr Fagley.
Colombia does not seem to be the solution to the problem of radiation too much in China. In American folk imagination, the country foreseen the associations with coffee and armed conflicts more than industry. However, Mr Daffach threw Medsource into an up -to -date repetition: Colombia was a country of 52 million people, where, despite the ongoing manifestations of armed hostilities in some areas, growth was progressing.
Cartagena had one of the largest container doors in South America, including connections to Jacksonville, Florida, where Medsource had a distribution center. The trip could be completed in just one week, compared to four weeks from China to the east coast.
The city was also a hub of the oil industry focusing on a large refinery. This meant that it had stocks of basic material derived from oil – plastic.
Medsource soon forged a company company, with Mr Daffach in charge. Production began in a leased factory in 2022, starting with the leaves available for Gurneys used in ambulances. The following year, the company was transferred to its own space in a free trade zone.
The cost of producing goods at the Colombia plant was generally within 10 % of China’s these, Mr Fagley said. Previously, this gap was unfounded. But the experience of the world in exhaustion of basic elements during the pandemic – medical masks, medicines, fans – has changed accounting.
The value of the greatest durability was reinforced by the end of 2023 as Houthi rebels in Yemen began shooting rockets on ships in the Red Sea with solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli attack on Gaza. This closed the Suez channel effectively, a vital artery of shipping between Europe and Asia.
In the same year, a drought in Central America threw water levels on the Panama channel, forcing its supervisors to limit the ships they could pass.
As Mr Fagley was in the factory one morning this month, studying the floor from a medium, three dozen women rolled over sewing machines, the synthetic fabric ribbons on medical tools previously made in China.
Some aggressive handles on the sides of the bodies to be purchased by the US Army. Others were sewn a disposable sheets. Mariselis Pajaro, 41, was part of a group that made cuffs to prevent infection during blood pressure tests.
Before entering the factory three years ago, Ms. Pajaro suffered her family in part, perhaps earning $ 100 a month. He lived in a strip of dirt in the city of Turbana. Rats, snakes and mosquitoes with dengue fever fever often penetrated the rotten houses of her wooden house. The rain fell through the rusty metal sheets of her roof. Every storm left her anxiously that her home would collapse.
At the factory, he won three times more. Her 21 -year -old daughter and son, 20, both worked at the factory. Their collective salaries had allowed to build a brick house away. They bought a motorcycle, turning the commute to work-a predisposition to a city square, then a 40-minute bus route-in a 20-minute straight shot on their own wheels.
“I never had the experience of a fixed income before,” Ms. Pajaro said. “I feel much safer.”
As Mr Fagley and Mr Daffach hugged how quickly they were expanding, they received attention to the local availability of the necessary supplies. The largest supplier of the fabric, a factory in Bogota, pumped almost all of its raw materials from Colombia, limiting delays.
Mr. Daffach was planning to start making medical nonsense later this year. An American customer wanted four million per year. Mr Daffach preferred to start with a million to ensure that he could satisfy quality standards.
The company was planning to add a second story to its factory, but first wanted clarity about the available tax incentives.
In a recent afternoon, Mr Fagley and Mr Daffach visited Cartagena Mayor Dumek Turbay at Colonial Tustains House serving as a town hall, seeking his help in bureaucracy.
Mr Turbay noted that the port of Carthage had begun as a point of entry for the Spaniards, who arrived, seeking to export valuable products. It increased as a point of entry for the enslaved people who brought from Africa. Today, he added, the same port was a central part of the wealth development plans for the locals.
“It’s an opportunity,” Mr Turbay said.
Later, Mr Fagley and Mr Daffach traveled to the largest terminal containers in the port. They were informed of the intentions of the port to expand. They received the assurance from a map that set in front of them: intermittent lines that connect Carthage with ports along the eastern coast of the United States. Here was a corridor that avoided both Panama’s and Suez channels, a free and clean from what came to the American relationship with China.
“It’s as safe as you can get to an insecure world,” Mr Fagley said.
However, less than two weeks later, Mr Trump complicates that the claim, offering a reminder that – under his term – anything related to trade is accompanied by uncertainty.
Until then, Mr Fagley was in a commercial demonstration in Dubai, met with potential partners from the United States and around the world.
“What matters most is the patients we serve and the security of the US supply chain for critical medical devices,” Mr Fagley said late Sunday, adding that the company “remains flexible in its strategy”.
