CAPLINQ as Market and Distribution Partner in Europe and the Americas
If you do a Google search for a logistics or market partner to import into Europe or the Americas, you will find pages upon pages of search results of logistics companies, that are happy to do business carrying your goods from your doorstep to your customers' doorsteps in Europe, Canada, the United States or Mexico. The problem is that you are probably NOT looking for someone to help you carry boxes into these countries, but a market partner that can help you GROW in these markets. For this, a box-carrier isn't going to help you.
"Wouldn't it be great if you could find a market partner that not only imported and distributed your products, but also helped you market and promote them under your own name?"
How CAPLINQ can help you grow your business?
At CAPLINQ, we are a small manufacturing company that gets it. Having started in 2004 in Canada with and polyimide films and tapes, we added a second facility in the Netherlands in 2006. Our business has always been business-to-business with a focus on long-term customers that need to test and qualify our materials in a production environment before making any repeat purchases. Having started in Canada with much of our sales to the United States, we understood the ins-and-outs of exporting from Canada and importing goods to the United States and Mexico. Being part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), none of this could have prepared this however for our entry into the Netherlands. Here, we found a whole new set of challenges exporting goods from Canada to Europe including tariffs, duty, MUCH MORE expensive shipping costs, container planning and shipping, REACH and RoHs regulations, and storage of goods requiring cold staorage and having a limited shelf-life.
Bit by bit, and year by year, we overcame each set of challenges, amd realized that we could partner with other suppliers, help them establish a footprint of their own in Europe and avoid the long, expensive mistakes that we had made. Since 2006, and with careful selection, we have very slowly added to our list of suppliers, signing contracts only with those that shared our values of cooperation and growth. For a true partnership to work, we as CAPLINQ need to be transparent with our pricing and customer list and suppliers need to trust us to follow-up their leads. In short, it needs to feel from both sides that CAPLINQ is truly an extension of the supplier's own organization.
Since 2006 we slowly added suppliers that met this criteria starting with MJ Gordon with carnauba wax spray, then Profound Materials with Lead Free Solder Spheres. Most recently in 2011, we added SolEpoxy to our list of suppliers and now import for them more than 300 metric tonnes (660,000 lbs) of Epoxy Coating Powder and Epoxy Mold Compounds.
What is of particular interest with SolEpoxy is that they already had an existing customer base in Europe, but no defined "footprint" in Europe with sales offices or distribution partners. By partnering with CAPLINQ, we were able to pick up the goods Ex-works from there New York state factory, and delivery it Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) to their customers in Europe much less expensively than they were able to do on their own. More impressively, this was done with refrigerated cargo that needs to be shipped in cooled reefers over the Atlantic and stored in CAPLINQ's refrigerated units in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Furthermore, they were able to provide their customers a local stock which provided customers not only the reassurance of a secure safety stock, but also provided them with Just-On-Time delivery.
At CAPLINQ our suppliers are our #1 customers
As an extension of our suppliers sales, market and logistics team, we understand that our #1 job is to keep our suppliers happy. An important part of this is to keep our supplier's customers happy, but to ensure a true partnership, we go beyond far, far beyond that. Here is a list of the services that we provide to ensure that our suppliers get the best service from CAPLINQ, and in turn that their customers get the best service from them:
- Value-Added Hybrid Agent
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- An online shopping and fulfillment cart
- Local Technical Representation
- Customer Service
- Production Planning and Container Optimization
- Export, Import and Customs Clearance
- Fiscal Representation
- Logistics, Warehousing and Distribution
The CAPLINQ difference
Interested to know how CAPLINQ can help you? Please Contact us for more information. Experience for yourself the CAPLINQ difference and discover how you can make your footprint.
