Whitepath Fab Tech Video Transcript

Back to Cable Assembly in Mexico

Whitepath Fabtech, an Ellijay, Georgia-based supplier to the HVAC equipment industry, has experienced stunning growth in Mexico since opening its first manufacturing facility there in 2007 to supply industry giant Carrier Corp. with control panels for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

The company began with seven employees occupying 10,000 square-feet at Offshore Group’s La Angostura Industrial Park in Saltillo, Coahuila. It has grown exponentially and now has 65 employees on a 40,000 square-foot facility in nearby Ramos Arizpe. That growth now looks modest and the company has started to construct another building that will bring the production area to 85,000 square-feet.

This is Whitepath’s only facility outside the United States, where it has three. The company initially rented industrial space in Mexico, and then decided to fund its own construction. It assembles harnesses and control boxes for medium-sized commercial and industrial Carrier units in Ramos Arizpe, at the only site outside of The Offshore Group’s Saltillo cluster.

The production from Ramos Arizpe is sent to three Carrier factories — Carrier Commercial and two Carrier Residential factories — on the periphery of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, a distance of 40 miles. Those plants, in turn, export approximately 95 percent of their production.

Whitepath was founded in 1989. In addition to electronic control panels for HVAC applications, it also manufactures discrete wires, wiring harnesses and control boxes for other heating and cooling applications.

Currently, Whitepath Fabtech in Mexico produces exclusively for Carrier, though it will have the capacity to produce for others in the future. The company is running two shifts at its Mexican facility and forecasts reaching 100 employees by the end of 2011. Even though Whitepath Fabtech is not in The Offshore Group Saltillo industrial park, it considers that shelter relationship vital to its efficiency, enabling the company to focus entirely on production while Offshore deals with all non-production related functions.