“We’ve had our best year in Brazil,” the official, Emilio López Rodríguez, told Plastics News in an interview in Mexico.

The €18m worth of business in the South American country “is more than 50% up on 2010”, he said.

López is KraussMaffei’s head of injection moulding technology sales in Ibero-America.

Brazil, where 650 KraussMaffei injection moulding machines are installed, and Mexico are the German company’s two largest markets in Latin America, López said.

In Mexico sales of new KraussMaffei injection moulding machinery have totaled between €15m and €16m in 2011, slightly up on last year’s, he added.

By next year the company will have installed about 1,000 new machines, including both injection moulding machines and extruders, in Mexico in 15 years, according to Héctor Moreno, managing director of KraussMaffei subsidiary KraussMaffei de México.

“Our main business is still automotive, which is mainly injection moulding,” Moreno said in a separate interview, adding that, out of 185 KraussMaffei customers in Mexico, about 100 are in the automotive industry.

“In automotive, some of our customers have grown by up to 30% in the last two years, mainly because they’re exporting a lot.” Major KraussMaffei automotive industry customers include Plastic Tec of Mexico City.

KraussMaffei also serves sectors such as packaging, domestic products, electronics and medical, Moreno said.

Its most recent sales include that of a 1,600-ton clamping force injection moulder, bought by Plásticos Panamericanos of Tultitlán, near Mexico City, which will use it to produce pallets for Fomento Ecónomico Mexicano (Femsa), of Monterrey, a leading soft drink and beer bottler.

Munich-based López said that, while Brazilian customers tend to purchase mainly very large injection moulding presses, in Mexico the clamping force demand is more varied, ranging from 50 tons to 4,000 tons.

“Argentina is always a surprising market, difficult, but they buy big machines. This year we sold six big machines (up to 4,000 tons clamping force) in Argentina and that’s not usual.”

He described both Colombia, where KraussMaffei opened a sales office four years ago, and Peru as “good markets” with good growth potential.

When comparing Brazil and Mexico, he described machinery import duties in Brazil as “very high”, whereas in Mexico they are non-existent.

“The border is the best in the Americas after Chile,” he said, referring to Mexico. “We have had no cases of corruption in Veracruz and Altamira,” the two Gulf of Mexico ports where imported KraussMaffei machinery arrives from Europe.

“We get our machines out in two days. If you have your documentation in order, there’s no problem.”

KraussMaffei has not come across corruption in its dealings with private companies in Mexico either, he said. “We deal with a lot of companies, both national and international, and no money crosses hands.”

Moreno said a concern continues to be the importation of used machines. “60% of the machines coming into Mexico are second hand,” he said.

This year the company, which employs a full-time staff of 23, introduced a 240-hour diploma course to increase the knowledge of those working in the plastics industry and to help combat the importation of used equipment.