REVOLUTIONIZING COMMERCE

Industry 4.0 and nearshoring seem to be on the lips of all companies in Mexico. These phenomena are already a fact, they have come to revolutionize and facilitate trade in our country.

This trend is forcing organizations to evolve frequently, to maintain their competitiveness in the market and not be affected by the arrival of new companies in the region.

Nearshoring is already a fact, data released by the Ministry of Economy mention that Nuevo León alone received 4,397 million dollars in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in 2022, the highest amount in the last 12 years and representing an increase of 34% compared to the previous year. In the first quarter of 2023, investment in industrial construction increased by 60%, as foreign companies have started building their industrial plants.

The challenges they face are great, among them we find the expansion in production volumes and inventories, adequate facilities to carry out their production processes, an increase in their workforce and their work team, qualified and trained labor to fulfill the required tasks, among others; however, all these challenges can be faced with high technological resources and the appropriate advice to know how to work them.

Technology impacts nearshoring in two ways:

• In the first scenario, we observe all those companies that arrive in Mexico with their technological processes and systems to operate in the same way that they operate in their country of origin; which will affect our country because they will have competitive advantages over the domestic market, but at the same time, it benefits the region because companies can take these companies as an example and adapt their processes in a similar way to the one they operate, and thus continue to grow technologically and economically.
• In the second scenario, there are organizations that seek to relocate their plants in our country, but to generate alliances with local suppliers that can lead them to achieve their objectives and meet the needs of their customers. Within these local providers, what will be contracted in technological matters will be: Cloud Services, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Apps, specialized software, internal platforms, among others.
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Nowadays, we are already seeing that companies from northern countries, such as the United States and Canada, are already hiring Mexican technology and information technology companies to support their technological services, taking advantage of the geographical proximity and the facilities provided by the T-MEC to foreign trade between themselves.

Organizations and work teams must constantly monitor technology compliance with objectives, so that its installation in the country can bear the expected fruits, mainly taking into account issues such as data privacy, compliance with standards and regulations, quality control, etc.

The companies that have arrived and are expected to arrive in Mexico are first-world companies, and they are used to having local suppliers that have this type of technology, so Mexican companies in the technology and IT sector need to be up to speed to be able to stay in the nearshoring supply chain.

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