W.W. Grainger Inc., Lake Forest, Ill., is expanding operations in Colombia through aa joint venture with an affiliate of Torhefe S.A., THF International SAS. Grainger owns an 80 percent majority position in the joint venture, with THF International SAS maintaining 20 percent.
Torhefe, with 2009 sales of $23 million USD, is a leading distributor of maintenance, repair and operating (MRO) supplies in Colombia, with an emphasis on fasteners. The company has five locations in Colombia, including Barranquilla, Bogota, Cali, Cartagena and Medellin. The joint venture plans to operate under the Torhefe brand name in its existing locations, transitioning to the Grainger name over the next year.
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.