On a bright sunny day, we left early at the crack
of dawn to pay a visit to the Colon Free trade zone - International Commerce center.
It proved to be a great experience for us, being one of the biggest free trade zones
in the world, only smaller than Hong Kong.
Julio
Ernest, a former member of the Bryant family and a proud member of his alma mater
took charge with much enthusiasm of showing us the Colon free zone.
Founded in
1947 with 50 hectares of land-the City of Colon, situated at the entrance of
the Atlantic side of the Panama Colon, is now an emporium of 500 hectares with
over 3200 companies that operate from it, where over 32,000 people are
employed. The productive activities taking place in the colon free trade zone
represent about 10% of Panama’s GNP.
Julio Ernest, a Bryant Alumni, works in the Multinational Corporation Motta International (http://www.motta-int.com/es/index.html) which acts as a
representative for numerous companies fostering shipment services to designated
locations. Motta International is also the first company to be established in the Colon Free Trade Zone and has license number 001 (each company in the zone is issued a license number). They work with various industries including electronics,
liquors, and personal items. We were also fortunate enough to get the
opportunity of visiting the showroom of this corporation which enables the
buyers to view the products’ samples as the corporation runs a wholesale
business. The vice president of marketing for the corporation was also generous enough to
provide us with a discount card that permitted us to buy products at the duty free
shop.
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Colon Free Trade Zone - Julio Ernesto in the center (wearing the tie)
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Our next
destination was the May’s corporation which has gigantic warehouses stretching
across approximately 360,000 sq. meters displaying thousands of different products
to provide service to the wholesalers. Jose Jimenez at
May’s provided us with a tour of the showroom. He also showed us the soccer
balls designed for the FIFA world cup 2014 and these products were slated to be
sold to the wholesalers by the Christmas of 2014. At the end of the tour one of the owners of this biggest company in the zone joined us in conversation.
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| At May's lighting section with one of the owners (center blue tie) |
Our tour did not originally include the expansion site of the Panama Canal however due to much hearsay and the buzz about it among the locals in
Panama, our professors decided to take us there and we had a wonderful
experience as the place was lauded with natural beauty. It is one the biggest
construction sites in the world right now. It’s beautiful and
fascinating to see how adeptly the construction material bought from different
countries has been perfectly crafted into its construction. For example, the
locks used in the canal were brought from Italy and each lock weighs about 3200
tons. There are about 30,000 employees working at the canal where workers come from different parts of the world (36 countries to be precise). The expansion of
this canal is expected to be ready by August 2015. To witness the expansion of
this canal is not something that the average person gets to experience every day, but
we were fortunate enough to be able to. Hopefully in the future we can return
and see the Panama Canal in full-fledged operation.
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