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reduces the weight of the chassis by 80 pounds of what would have been excess paint, and offers a seven-year warranty because the coating is actu- ally embedded in the steel. It gives you what we call the ‘BMW car auto-finish’ to our chassis,with very good scrape and scratch and rust resistance. There’s very high-end technology going into chas- sis manufacturing today.And, to my knowledge, we are the only ones to have invested the millions of dollars into the KTL coating system for chassis.” CIMC also made certain other technological advancements available to its customers that can help them in their operations.“We are able to weigh chassis; we can weigh a box on a chassis with an onboard scale,”Sonzala explains.“We can trace tires as they go down the road and monitor them, and send any kind of report by GPS and cell phone lines to a computer that a dispatcher can monitor.We can monitor tire inflation,ABS oper- ation, and container box doors can be monitored for being open or closed.” The improvements in chassis construction and design, added to the upgrades in chassis compo- nents and the advanced monitoring devices, have clearly paid off well for CIMC Intermodal Equip- ment. In 2012, the company sold over 6,000 chas- sis; last year it sold 27,000+.“So, the growth there was very strong from 2012 to 2017,”Sonzala says. “Our forecast for this year is to top 33,000 total chassis, and someday we will get to 60,000.We’ve got 77-78 percent of all the chassis business in North America.There’s a reason for that and it’s not price; we’re not making a whole lot of money at the price we’re selling for, but our customers can’t get the quality and the quantity anywhere else.We’re very good at what we do.” PREFERRED VENDORS n PPG Industries www.ppg.com PPG Industries, Inc. is an American Fortune 500 com- pany and global supplier of paints, coatings, specialty materials, fiberglass, and optical products. Founded in 1883, as Pittsburgh Plate Glass by Captain John B. Ford and John Pitcairn, today, PPG has global headquarters in Pittsburgh, and operates in nearly 70 countries around the globe. By revenue it is the largest coatings company in the world. PPG serves customers in construction, con- sumer products, industrial, and transportation markets, and aftermarkets. n SAF Holland www.safholland.com SAF Holland is a leading global commercial vehicle sup- plier and the largest independent listed manufacturer of chassis-related systems and components for trailers and semi-trailers, trucks and buses. CIMC INTERMODAL EQUIPMENT Sonzala believes that,within five or ten years, CIMC Intermodal Equipment will likely build its own factory in the U.S. to manufacture chassis for its North Amer- ican product line and even begin shipping chassis to China to help its growing economymeet the demand. “So,we’re currently looking into that option,” says Sonzala.“It’s not on the horizon very soon; it takes a lot of time to make a decision that big, and to find the right place.We’d like to have a deep water port, for sure, because I can see us sending these chassis all over the world, not just back to China.” Meanwhile, CIMC Intermodal Equipment and its sis- ter SCVC company in China continue to maintain their symbiotic relationship.“We put together a task force between our Chinese counterpart and our Ameri- can factory that we call ‘The Space Station.’”Sonzala relates.“Three ‘astronauts’ come in for three months at a time from the Shenzhen headquarters - engineers, quality people, customer service people.We teach them about the chassis business in North America and we have our people learning from them.At the end of three months, they go back to China to do a better job, then another group comes over and we start the process over again.This brings new designs for chassis; newways for producing them and making themmore maintenance-free; newways of making themmultiple lengths.We want chassis to last fifteen to twenty years and never have to get another paint job; and at some point in time to have disc brakes, like our cars do, instead of drum brakes.There are so many things that we are doing, looking to the future and remembering that, in the past, intermodalism started with a guy,MalcomMcClean, having a dream of putting a box on a ship and moving it somewhere.”