Höxter/Colombia, 25 August 2017. The Arntz Optibelt Group has opened a new warehouse in Colombia with an area of around 1,200 square meters. Here, agricultural, industrial and automotive products will be stored alongside cutting machines for timing belts, ready for operation. The new warehouse is located in Cali, the capital of Colombia’s Departamento Valle del Cauca, within the free trade area “Zona Franca del Pacifico”. Thanks to its access to the Pacific through Buenaventura, Cali is seen as Colombia’s gateway to Asia and the geographic hub of Latin America’s Pacific integration. “With this new warehouse, we can improve the availability of goods and significantly reduce delivery times,” Karl Asendorf, Optibelt’s Managing Director of Sales in North and South America, remarks.
Initially, the warehouse will mainly be used to supply customers in Colombia. In a second step, this will be extended to further customers in Latin America, especially in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Panama and Guatemala. The new location is conveniently situated in direct proximity to a local international airport and to Colombia’s main sea port, “Buenaventura”. “With this new warehouse, we will have the opportunity to serve a wider range of customers in the future; this also includes customers that are not able to place entire container orders,” Asendorf explains. “Additionally, Colombia holds high internal market potential, which we expect to continue to grow in the next few years.” Ten new positions were filled for the new warehouse.
The Colombian team, led by Danny Mañosas, thus includes four field staff for the regions of Colombia and Central America/the Caribbean, two internal staff and three externally hired employees for the warehouse.
In North and South America, the high performance drive belts of the Arntz Optibelt Group are predominantly used in agriculture, in the oil, gas, automobile, mining, food and textile industries as well as in pulp and paper production.
