Profile of the companies participating in the Mexican national exports award

Resumen

Objective: To identify the profile of the companies participating in the Mexican National Exportation Award (NEA) in the Large Agricultural Exporting Companies category (LAEC), by an information-gathering tool to determine the commercial lines of those businesses, their state of origin, and the exports destination.

Methodology: a total of 17 questionnaires (n = 17), applied by the NEA to the LAEC category participants during the 2010-2018 period, were analyzed to determine the commercial business lines, their state of origin, and the destination of the exports. A problem tree was created to find opportunity areas to design solution proposals. The collected information was processed in the NetDraw 2.097 software to show the networks, their dominant actors (countries to which they export), and the products that the companies exported the most.

Results: pork and vegetables business lines were identified. The latter revealed a sub-network of tomatoes and strawberries. A network was generated with an open structure comprising 17 nodes and 46 links where three export destination countries stood out: the USA with 15 links, Canada with six, and Japan with five. The highest exported product was the tomato in its different varieties, mainly to the U.S. and Canada.

Limitations: Scarce information about the award on the internet. Access restrictions. Most of the exporting companies did not respond to the survey.

Conclusions: the perishability of exported products determines the number of destination countries. The precariousness of Mexican agricultural exports was identified because companies trade only one product or a reduced number of them to only one country.