FACE2FACE Carlos Rodolfo Schneider CISER, Brazil
Carlos Rodolfo Schneider is vice president of CISER, the largest manufacturer of fasteners in South America. At Fastener Fair Brasil Mr Schneider talked exclusively to Phil Matten about the company and the Brazilian market, exploring both challenges and opportunities. Here are his responses.
About the man Carlos Rodolfo Schneider graduated from the São Paulo Business Administration School of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation
in the late 1970s. Subsequently he obtained his Masters in Business Administration from the same institution. Since 1987 he has been involved in the management of Grupo H. Carlos Schneider, which in addition to CISER includes a real estate business and a road freight company, which delivers CISER fasteners and collects raw materials for its production units. He was president of the Business Association of Joinville from 2009 to 2011 and served as honorary consul of Colombia to Santa Catarina from 1996 to 2003. From 2003 to 2005 he was president of Centrais Elétricas de Santa Catarina S.A.
How CISER operates today CISER operates separately and with distinctive brands in the
automotive market and other markets. We think that is important because the processes and requirements involved are different. Having said that we have the feeling that some other industries are also getting much more stringent in their processes so maybe in the future we will need to consider reintegrating our operations. For now, though, it is better to be distinct. We began preliminary discussions with Nedschroef three
years ago and started the partnership at Sarzedo properly about 18 months ago. As well as bringing their internationally recognised brand Nedschroef also brought the knowledge and experience of a global automotive supplier. We have almost concluded a similar partnership agreement
with a Japanese automotive supplier. We entered this partnership because Toyota is asking for local support and it is much easier to join an existing operation than to start a new manufacturing business here. For us this is very important and reaffirms CISER’s position as the desired manufacturing partner here in Brazil. For the general market we have three distribution centres, one
here in Guarulhos, São Paulo, one in Joinville, and one in Caxias do Sul, which helps us to be closer to the market.
The Brazilian export challenge Today 95% of our sales of standard products are in Brazil.
The proportion of our export business has diminished, mainly because of what we call ‘custo Brazil’ (Brazilian cost) - something that worries all industries here. It is a combination of factors including taxes, labour costs, finance costs, and difficulties in infrastructure amongst other things. There is a group here in Brazil working hard to change these things but it takes a lot of effort and time. At present the exchange rate also does not help us to
compete. For a long time we were the strongest supplier in Argentina. Now the possibility for Argentinean companies to import low cost fasteners from China combined with the high exchange rate of the Brazilian Real works against us. Right now Argentina also has strong trade barriers on Brazilian products as well as complicated bureaucracy – designed to motivate Brazilian companies to invest directly there. It is not easy, though, to evaluate whether that is a good business investment strategy, particularly as the political climate in Argentina is still not entirely reliable.
The Ciser headquarters and plant in Joinville
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Fastener + Fixing Magazine • Issue 73 January 2012
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