The vision of this Mexico City-based company has been very clear since its founding 25 years ago: to offer welders the best tools to perform their work efficiently, fully and comfortably. And best of all, Okila’s president, James Jim Neimeister, who is based in Cleveland and works with his partner, Ricardo Dabdoub, who operates from the capital of Mexico, has achieved this with "good, beautiful and cheap" solutions, as he likes to say in the Mexican style.
In fact, the motto of this importer and wholesaler is "Delivering value", under the slogan of bringing to the Mexican market and its distributor customers, at the best possible price, a whole series of objects, machinery and gases that make possible everything that involves welding and metal cutting activities. Okila imports its merchandise in containers from Asia, particularly China, although it also moves trailers from the United States and even has in its catalog some products that are manufactured in Mexico.
In this company’s catalog there is an enormous amount of products, including those that help oxy-fuel and plasma cutting, as well as torches, regulators –oxygen, acetylene, butane–, trolleys for mechanized cutting, flowmeters, light inverter machines for welding, electrodes for TIG and MIG, tungsten sharpeners, electric ground clamps, electrodes for TIG and MIG, a whole line of safety equipment (both manual and electronic helmets, gloves, glasses, caps, goggles), which are used in many industries such as oil, automotive and other large companies such as John Deere or Caterpillar, to small workshops that work with metal, such as tinsmiths.
Okila recently ventured into the sale of welding machines under its own brands (Weld 500 and Cortec) and a division that covers regulators and oxygen cylinders for hospital uses, taking advantage of the fact that this type of gas is indispensable for its natural market, that of welding.
“We don't have everything for the welder, but we have a lot,” says Jim Neimeister with good humor. “We sell small things, things that cost a few pesos to machines that cost 100,000 pesos, and our distributors sell them to thousands of customers of all sizes.” And it's not that Okila's partners are not fans of automation and robotics, "we don't sell that, and we agree that if someone wants to spend $500,000 dollars on a robot or machine, go ahead, but if they want to spend something for 300 pesos that will really save them thousands of dollars and make them improve in quality and productivity, that’s where we are, that’s what our business is all about.”
At FABTECH México 2022, the company will show some new products, although its offer is focused on products that have been around for some time but are not so well known in the Mexican market and therefore, not taken advantage of. “Maybe those who visit us will not find something so fancy and sophisticated, but you can be sure that we will deliver high value products,” Neimeister concludes.