Borderlands is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week: ImportYeti launches tool to help brands source Mexico-made goods; Pharr bridge construction expansion project set to begin in August; Hammond Power Solutions opens fourth plant in Mexico; and United Kingdom-based logistics company opens Dallas office.
ImportYeti recently launched a new data set to increase visibility of Mexico’s supply chain, aiming to to help brands source products from suppliers south of the border and make more business connections.
The site is a sort of search engine to look up any company’s suppliers tool that hunts through bills of lading to see what cargo they are importing, where it comes from and reveal where a retailer is getting its goods.
David Applegate, who founded ImportYeti in 2021, said they decided to add Mexico suppliers to the sites offering because of requests from customers.
ImportYeti previously featured suppliers in Asia and Europe.
“People were just going, ‘Hey, we want this Mexico, we want this Mexico,’” Applegate said in an interview with FreightWaves. “It’s always hard dealing with data of this size. It’s not like it’s 10 records. It’s hundreds of millions of records. It took us a good four months to be able to wrangle the Mexico data set to the point where we felt it was up to our standards for the customers who asked for it.”
Mexico is currently the top trading partner of the U.S., totaling almost $800 billion in 2023. In April, Mexico’s two-way trade with the U.S. totaled $72.47 billion, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau.
ImportYeti searches over 90 million public shipping records to increase transparency of the global supply chain.
Applegate came up with the idea for ImportYeti while running WrestlingMart, an e-commerce store dedicated to wrestling. While running that business, Applegate said he always wanted to know where his suppliers were sourcing the gear he sold.
“My earlier business is WrestlingMart. We’re the world’s largest collegiate e-commerce wrestling store. We sell gear and shoes and things like that for the high school, college wrestling space,” Applegate said. “Making certain supply chain decisions is very hard. How do you find the right manufacturer for this? Or how do you find the right manufacturer for something else.”
Applegate said the COVID-19 pandemic killed the wrestling market for several years and ImportYeti came after that.
“From that point in time, we became very close to the customer who’s ever wanted to use the site,” Applegate said. “We try to reach out to them, hear how they’re using ImportYeti, what they’re using it for, if they’re liking it, or what their issues are.”
One of the very first kind of online threads Applegate and his staff saw were people in the logistics space using the site fanatically.
“People trying to find other people who import a certain product from overseas, so they could sell them services such as freight forwarding, or maybe 3PL warehouse space, or maybe their a customs broker or something like that,” Applegate said.
ImportYeti’s first market segment were people who were trying to find suppliers, which eventually expanded to include 3PLs and logistics managers.
“The first kind of business or market segment for us was people who were trying to find suppliers, like the right supplier for a coffee mug. That quickly evolved to people who were using the site to sell to people who import those coffee — someone who works at a logistics company saying, ‘I need to find more customers that move refrigerated units into the Port of Los Angeles, because that’s where I have the asset capacity,’” Applegate said. “We fully appreciate our customers. We ask, ‘How can we model our searches to help them solve their business problems?’”
Pharr bridge construction expansion project set to begin in August
The city of Pharr, Texas, recently awarded a $47 million contract to a construction company for an expansion project adding capacity to the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, according to KRGV.com.
The expansion will build four additional southbound lanes on the bridge to decrease wait times at the border. There are currently three southbound lanes and one northbound lane on the bridge.
Construction is set to start in August, and is scheduled to be completed in 2026.
Trade at Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge totaled $45.8 billion in 2023. The bridge connects Pharr to Reynosa, Mexico, a major center for manufacturing in the country.
Hammond Power Solutions opens fourth plant in Mexico
Hammond Power Solutions (HPS) recently announced the opening of its fourth Mexico plant in the municipality of Guadalupe.
The new plant strengthens the company’s production capacity and will create 400 jobs, company officials said.
“Launching our fourth plant in Guadalupe, greatly enhances our capacity and flexibility for our North American customers. This move reaffirms our commitment to delivering top-quality, reliable power solutions and addressing the increasing demand in the region,” David Kinsella, COO, said in a statement.
Guadalupe is located about 57 miles from the border crossing in Eagle Pass, Texas.
HPS is an Ontario, Canada-based manufacturing company that produces dry-type transformers, power products and related magnetics.
United Kingdom-based logistics company opens Dallas office
United Kingdom-based 3PL Speedy Freight recently announced the opening of its first office in the U.S. in Dallas.
The Dallas office will provide services such as full truckload, less-than truckload, drayage, expedited shipping and cross-border operations.
Speedy Freight also offers inventory and supply chain management services; as well as warehousing capacity and cross dock ability.
Founded in 2006, Speedy Freight has more than 60 branches across the U.K. and Europe, servicing over 10,000 customers in multiple industries.
