Meet Juan Hernandez, owner of a store he calls the House of Rolling Bearings. Based in Punta Arenas, Chile, he is the world’s southernmost SKF distributor.Closer to Antarctica than to Chile’s capital of Santiago, Casa del Rodamiento might not be SKF’s biggest distributor, but it could be the most colorful. The store, nestled on a corner of a busy avenue in the blustery southern city of Punta Arenas, has clients ranging from modest snow-crab fishermen to the world’s largest methanol producers.
     Located 1,950 miles south of Santiago, the isolated Punta Arenas is a place where frigid winds of up to 75 miles per hour have been known to knock people down. Its economy is based on the oil industry, sheep ranches and fishing. In spite of a scant population of 120,000, Casa del Rodamiento, or the “House of Rolling Bearings” as it would be called in English, boasts a steady stream of customers.
     “This business for me has been like a shining star,” says owner Juan Hernandez, 72, who founded the store two decades ago after retiring from his first job at a cattle firm. Hernandez got the idea after working a year in an electrical workshop selling rolling bearings from a bookcase in a corner. Determined to become independent, Hernandez took 200,000 pesos (US$6,000) from his retirement funds to buy SKF products and opened for business from a tiny rented storefront in 1978.

Matchbox-sized venture
“It was the size of a matchbox and clients only came sporadically, so I started to get very nervous,” recalls Hernandez. But word soon spread and sales of rolling bearings and seals increased. So did Hernandez’s investments. In his first year sales totaled the equivalent of US$500. Today annual sales are around 17 million pesos (US$37,000).
     “I can’t complain,” says the dapper and youthful Hernandez, who over the years has used earnings from the business to buy Casa del Rodamiento’s current building, three houses, two cars and a truck. His four employees include a daughter and two sons-in-law. In homage to the source of the family’s business, Hernandez’s daughter Maria Angelica plans to decorate the driveway of her home by embedding the concrete with obsolete rolling bearings. “He has all kinds of relics of every shape and size,” she says with a laugh.
     On a recent gray and drizzly Monday, customers included a crab fisherman, a bus driver, a ferry boat employee and a lumber company administrator. “At first we came because of the prices, but then we just got used to coming here,” says Heraldo Vera, a fisherman who needed a rolling bearing for a pump on his boat. Vera uses his 36-foot cutter to catch some 110 pounds of snow crab, known as centolla, a day.
     These crabs are also caught and processed by another Casa del Rodamiento client, Pesquera Melinka, a company that owns a half dozen fishing boats. In a busy factory in Punta Arenas, Melinka employees in white aprons and masks boil, clean and freeze snow crab for export, mainly to Holland, Belgium and France.
     “There are two things you must do in Punta Arenas: stuff yourself with crab and kiss the toe of the Indian in the plaza,” says Spanish tourist Pedro Martin. Local legend stipulates that those who wish to return must visit the monument to Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan in the town plaza and kiss the toe of the reclining bronze Ona Indian.
     While many might consider the city’s location – at the foot of the Andes at the end of the world – a drawback, the world’s largest methanol producer, Methanex, sees it as an advantage. “In spite of the distance, we are in an ideal location because of the proximity of two oceans,” says Alejandro Palma, manager of administration and finance at the company.

Contribution to methanol
Methanol – also known as methyl alcohol – is obtained from natural gas and used primarily as a chemical building block. The highest methanol output worldwide comes from two Methanex plants in Punta Arenas, which produce 1.9 million tons a year. A third plant is slated to begin operations there by 1999. While most of the machinery in Methanex plants is very sophisticated, the pumps used for the process still get rolling bearings from Hernandez’s store, a convenience in light of the isolated address.
     Methanex acquires its gas from the National Petroleum Company (ENAP), another top customer that is also appreciative of the speedy delivery of rolling bearings and seals from SKF when Hernandez does not have them in stock.
     Initially, ENAP was forced to import all its parts for oilrigs from abroad. It later ordered everything from SKF in Santiago, but today more than 70 percent of the rolling bearings and seals come from the Casa del Rodamiento. “Hernandez helped us solve a lot of spare part problems,” says Gregorio Saez, head of imports for ENAP.
     With the rough roads, cold weather and tough working conditions, the need for spare parts, rolling bearings and seals is constant. In the lumber industry, trees must be cut down in the dead of winter because otherwise the mud caused by the melting snow bogs down machinery and logs alike. Road construction, however, must take place in the summer because temperatures in the winter average around 15 degrees Fahrenheit and prevent the concrete from settling properly. Yet both industries coincide on the importance of a good supply of spare parts.
     “Sometimes it is the smallest rolling bearing that can cause the greatest trouble and hold everything up,” says Pedro Vicente, manager at the Ingenieria Civil Vicente construction firm. The firm uses some 80 heavy machines and tractors for road construction and easily purchases more than 1,000 bearings a year from Hernandez. In 1997 the company built approximately 60 miles of roads around Punta Arenas, using a special mixture of cement instead of asphalt, which cracks under the punishing temperatures.
     It is the unpaved roads that are the root of all of National Car Rental’s problems in Punta Arenas. The company has some 300 vehicles for rent to firms and individuals in the area and is constantly sending representative Luis Cabezas to the Casa del Rodamiento for parts.
     “The roads are bad, and the cars are always breaking rolling bearings, especially the drivers who don’t bother to be careful since the vehicles don’t belong to them,” says Cabezas.

Elisabeth Love   
a journalist based in Santiago   
photos Helen Hughes