cimc_web

without having to constantly unpack and repack it. Because containerization managed to greatly reduce the expense and speed of international trade, it drastically changed the way the shipping industry had operated for centuries, and ultimate- ly led to the globalization of the world economy. Today, approximately 90 percent of all non-bulk cargo,worldwide, is moved by containers stacked on transport ships,with roughly a quarter of all container transshipments coming from China. In America, nearly 25 million containers are moved every year by some form of intermodal transport. CIMC, the China International Marine Corpo- ration, is the world’s largest manufacturer of container boxes and the trailer chassis that the boxes sit on when they get driven to their final destinations and then back again to the shipyards fromwhence they came. In 2008, CIMC bought 60 percent of a Texas-based chassis-making company called Direct Chassis; in 2011, CIMC acquired 100 percent of Direct Chassis and the company became part of CIMCUSA,was renamed CIMC Intermodal Equipment, and moved from Texas to South Gate, California where, today, it receives steel chassis components produced by CIMC in China.Those steel sub-assemblies are then combined with domestically sourced trailer components -wheels, tires, axles, suspensions, and electrical systems - to produce trailers and chassis engineered specifically for the North American market. In addition to its west coast facility, CIMC Intermodal Equipment opened another chassis CIMC INTERMODAL EQUIPMENT assembly plant in 2015, in Emporia,Virginia. “The chassis market, historically, has not been very sexy,” says Frank Sonzala, named company CEO/ President in 2016.“It’s been the cheapest, lowest-grade product in the transportation in- dustry.”The reason, according to Sonzala, is that, heretofore, chassis fleets were considered a step- child of the steamship companies; they titularly owned them, but they passed the responsibility for their performance onto the trucking companies that pulled them.Thus, they weren’t always built with safety or longevity in mind.“CIMC decided to change that way of operating and to make the standard product very similar to what is the stan- dard product in the trucking industry for a trailer,” Sonzala says,“a chassis that was more of a mod- ern premium than a very inexpensive product.” For example, CIMC changed their chassis’ tires from bias to radial, and improved their lighting and braking systems.“And now, the premium product is a whole lot safer on the highways and maintenance is minimal because you take the tires out of the equation, and you take lights out of the equation, and you put better brakes on it, and those are the three major maintenance items