Last Friday we planned a visit to ZF/TRW/VARGA and MAHLE, two major BBT suppliers
Let’s get on the road! here’s the skyline of our destination the city of Limeira still in the state of Sao Paolo Population is about 267.804. It must been said that this is a real nice area of Brazil, its safe, clean and there’s still a lot of work, although the recession took here also a lot of jobs away.
First stop TRW
Very well received by Enilton (Export sales manager) and our daily contact inside this company Nayara (export analyst) unfortunately we are not allowed to publish pictures from the production…:( but the plant is very impressive in size and our meeting was a real good one, we opened a lot of opportunities to centralize TRW VARGA classic Volkswagen solutions in europe around BBT.
A smaller freeway brings us to the South American aftermarket distribution center of Mahle..
Huge, brand new and state of the art complex, blew us of our socks!
Very well received by our friend and inside Mahle contact Pedro,
Pedro insisted to say Hi to all BBT friends and customers worldwide, a big Hi! Thanks Pedro to keep providing us the good piston and liner kits, bearings and other engine parts!
The warehouse is HUGE!! and remember this is only aftermarket!
Packing BBT orders…:)
rows and rows of piston and liner kits..
Small parts been warehoused in a 100% automatic section, inventory is made by weight!
Next stop was the Mahle Piston factory… this is almost like a village… here do work no less than 9000 people!
And this plant is also the home base for our friend Claus, CEO of Mahle South America. Claus is a VW lover like all of us and this was his brand new toy a real Double door Kombi… so sorry Claus was in Germany during our visit…
The Mahle show room!
How nice is this? Mahle don’t forget its history…
Claus his split window beetle is continuously on display in the Mahle showroom to remember everybody on the heritage of the company! This is the right spirit!
The Belgium flag was out with reason! Wowh this makes You very proud as a rather small customer from such a huge factory! Thanks for the respect Mahle, we will work even harder now to promote your products!
Due to company policy also here were not allowed to publish any pictures from production… but seeing the making of pistons from A to Z is a very very interesting procedure, and the quality control is immense in this factory! One of the quality controls is a X-ray of every piston for Diesel engines!
After our meeting and tour (and again also Mahle wants to concentrate their classic VW parts line around BBT for Europe) we went to Pedro’s house for our happy hour! Pedro has a nice bar at the back of his house! very cool place to hang out!
on the way back I spotted these two Brasilia’s in a back yard… cool view huh? oh yes there was another 10 orso Beetles as well… 🙂
Exhausted we arrived back in Sao Paolo and crashed on our beds… tomorrow there’s another day…
We insist to thank the teams from TRW and Mahle very very hard for the wonderful receptions and meetings, and for transport back and forth from Sao Paolo. Thank You to make our trip easier!