Cancun offers beautiful beaches, while Ciudad Juarez has endless sand dunes. But when it comes to choose a host city for competitiveness events, the Chihuahuan desert city tends to defeat for a wide margin the famous Caribbean resort.

That proved true once again when the members of the Federal Regulatory Improvement Commission [Cofemer] voted 97 per cent for the northern city as host for the 21st National Conference on Regulatory Improvement, held April 9 to 11 this year.

Over 300 mayors, government officials, experts, businessmen and scholars attended the event, where they shared experiences and debated on how to make their cities more competitive.

“And it is not an isolated congress”, boasts Maritere Yñarritu Salgado, director of the Juarez Conventions and Visitors Bureau. “We have received confirmation for the National Telecommunications Industry Chamber congress this year, as well as for the National Radiology Congress and the National Psychology Congress, to name just a few”.

“Many of them come to probe the conveniences our city has to offer”, said Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz.

One hundred of the Fortune 500 companies have operations in Ciudad Juarez, including General Electric, Whirpool, Honeywell, Lear Corporation, Electrolux, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Siemens, Federal Mogul, Epson and Bosch, the mayor said.

“We have 320 manufacturing plants employing 240,000 workers. In contrast, Tijuana’s 572 plants employ just 140,000 workers”, he said.

Foreign assembly plants

Mexico’s first foreign assembly plant established in Juarez in 1965, when there was not a single industrial park in the city and it rather looked as a small, dusty town whose residents worked in alfalfa and cotton fields.

But its strategic geographic position, a qualified workforce and lower operating costs lured 17 foreign companies employing 2,000 workers in the next four years.

Just TV set maker RCA hired 800 workers. The company found such a good environment that in the following years it opened additional new plants and increased its payroll to 4,000 workers.  After that Ciudad Juarez changed forever: hundreds of foreign assembly plants came to stay. But the city grew unevenly.

In early 1970 the city had half a million residents, and event though a third lived in poor conditions, it was said that you just had to enter any of the foreign assembly plants to find a job almost immediately.

The ceaseless arrival of foreign plants, immigrants from southern Mexico, and thousands of deported farm workers made for an explosive cocktail in Ciudad Juarez.

Looking to change that situation, at the beginning of this century a score of local business people decided to create the Juarez Strategic Plan [Plan Estrategico de Ciudad Juarez], a civil organization that invited business chambers, state and local governments and universities in a search for ways to diversify the city’s economy and achieve an orderly growth.

The organization designated four primary goals: make the city the centerpiece of a binational metropolitan region; a space of coexistence with high levels of social development and high quality life standards; a center of educational excellence and cultural creation; and an economy with a greater generation of wealth and added value.

The Plan changed the way of doing business in Juarez, said Manuel Sotelo Suarez, president of the Juarez Carriers Association and vicepresident of the National Chamber of Freight Transportation.

“Our customers decided to dismount their warehouses and replace them with assembly lines and have inventories on wheels or ‘just in time’”, he said. “The raw materials and finished products are in our trucks, and if we don’t arrive on time, assembly lines stop and we are penalized. That’s why we try to be highly efficient and very competitive”.

In Ciudad Juarez, with a million and a half residents, operate 320 foreign assembly plants -33 per cent from the automotive industry- distributed in 23 industrial parks.

Many homes

Construction is an industry particularly blooming in Juarez.

“[Juarez] is where more new homes are built in the world, about 25,000 each year, mostly for low-income families”, said Fernando Uriarte Zazueta, president of the National Housing Chamber (Canadevi) in Juarez.

“That means each year some 100,000 people (about 4 for each family) receive their own new home with basic services as water, electricity, paved roads and sewage. In order to keep pace, this year we local developers are going to invest 6 billion pesos [about USD 575 million], while the city will contribute an additional 2.8 billion pesos”, he said.

Brenda Nava, city industry director, said such an explosive urban growth is possible because the city’s economic expansion is equally powerful.

“Industrial annual [growth] rate ranges from 9 to 11 per cent, while the national average is 4 per cent”, she said. “Our city generates 2 per cent of the GNP and 50 per cent of the Gross State Product”.

“As of March 2008 we have reports of 407,794 Social Security affiliates [a figure used as an indicator of formal employment] and 29,920 businesses and companies of every kind and size, and about 150 more are added each day. Not for nothing our unemployment rate is 3.42 per cent, while the national average is 3.72 per cent”.

Foreign companies keep coming, forcing everybody to compete for their dollars. And the hospitality industry leads the way.

“We open 3 to 5 new tourist-category hotels a year”, said Lorenzo Rodriguez Flores, president of the Juarez Hotels and Motels Association and manager at the local Holliday Inn-Lincoln. “And now with the arrival of companies from Thailand, China, Japan and Korea, we have trained our chefs on new menus designed with the Asian executives in mind”.

Looking to support commercial and industrial growth, construction on a new USD76.5 million conventions center will start later this year in Juarez, according to Demetrio Sotomayor, head of tourism for northern Chihuahua State.

“It will be located nearby the Rio Grande, in front of El Paso [Texas], from where it will be visible”, he said.

The new center will host the main congresses, expositions and conventions in the State’s northern region.

Lucinda Vargas, a U.S. Federal Reserve economist and general director of the Juarez Strategic Plan, said that while the city ranks 5th in competitiveness nationwide, it should be viewed in a worldwide context.

“Among the best industrial and commercial areas within Canada, United States and Mexico, the Juarez-El Paso [Texas]-Las Cruces [New Mexico] corridor ranks 3rd in both dynamism and production, surpassed only by the Los Angeles and Chicago areas”, she said.

The renowned Juarez economist (the first Mexican female official to work for the U.S. Federal Reserve) said that ranking was determined according to competitiveness measurement guidelines approved by the World Economic Forum, which computes four main factors: institutions, technologic response capacity, higher education and training, and business environment, the same factors assessed by the Juarez Strategic Plan.

“We know we compete with cities around the world for investments”, she said. “That’s why we are so demanding with ourselves. Nothing must stop Juarez in its way to prosperity”.

Source: Chihuahuan Frontier