Mexico City, Jan 26 (Inditop.com/EFE) About 1,520 vehicles were protected with armour-plating in Mexico last year, a 20-percent drop from 2008, the Mexican Association of Automotive Armor-plating, or AMBA, said.
“This result shows that the armour-plating industry has not escaped the adverse economic conditions that have afflicted Mexico and specifically the auto industry over the past year,” AMBA said in a statement.
The association’s president, Fernando Echeverri, said that during 2009 it became evident that the decline would be more pronounced than was expected at the beginning of the year.
AMBA said that its six member companies accounted for a little more than 60 percent of all the armour-plating done in Mexico the previous year.
Mexico is one of the Latin American countries where armouring autos has shown the greatest technological development in recent years, while Brazil and Colombia have offered that technology for more than two decades, according to AMBA.
Echeverri said that the industry will come back strong this year though economic conditions will remain difficult, and fully expects gradual improvements in the sector’s sales in the second half of the year.
The increase in crime and violence has created a boom in the automotive armour-plating industry in Mexico, where the number of auto-armour firms has soared from six in 1996 to 52 at present.
The cost of armouring in the country varies from $20,000 to $80,000, and the increase in this kind of service has gone hand-in-hand with the surge of violence and lack of security that has shaken the country, where over the past three years organised crime has taken the lives of more than 15,000 people.
