TERREBONNE, Quebec — International Tire Repair Solutions Inc.(ITRS) has hired Jonathon Orellana to represent it in Chile and to work toward opening a representative office there.
ITRS said it expects to have a subsidiary company operating before year-end in in Chile, a market with considerable potential because of that country's extensive mining industry.
Mr. Orellana comes to ITRS from Group Bailac, a Chilean OTR tire/retread specialist company, where he worked for a dozen years as a tire repair technician working all over Latin America.
"After meetings with key players in the Chilean mining industry this past winter, we decided that to best meet our customers' needs, we needed local and permanent representation," ITRS President Gilles Wauthy said, noting that Mr. Orellana "has seen firsthand the economical and overall benefits of tire repair."
Terrebonne-based ITRS has been expanding into Latin American markets since 2012, opening a subsidiary in Costa Rica and establishing agencies in Mexico and Ecuador. Opening a unit in Chile would enable the company the ability to cover distribution throughout all of Latin America, ITRS said.
Chile is considered the world's No. 1 producer of copper – satisfying over a third of world demand — and a major source of other resources, such as iron, molybdenum, nitrate, gold and silver.
ITRS is the exclusive distributor of Bestpatch Tire Repair in North, Latin and South America and Tap Rap in North America and since 2018 is the owner of Vulcan-Vulcap Industries, a producer of tire repair, retread and curing equipment, including section repair mold, ''C'' Clamp, spotter, retread equipment and the Vulcaflex Vulcanizing Repair system.