Cementing ties.

Talk about your non-traditional exports. Mexico City concrete company Pretecsa recently moved 1.8 million kilograms of concrete building panels--the outer "skin" of modern buildings--to Salt Lake City for its new public library. It took 140 truckloads traveling 525,000 kilometers to move 2,080 panels to the job site, where the whole thing was put together like a gigantic and heavy, jigsaw puzzle.

Pretecsa first had to convince Salt Lake it could train its people to U.S. building codes and that exchange-rate risk was manageable, says Alejandro Fastag, CEO of Pretecsa. "They found every way possible for us not to take the project," he says. "We had to show it was technically achievable." More than 50% of Pretecsa's US$4.2 million bid was labor costs, which are perhaps one-fifth of U.S. cost, says Fastag.

Logistics were daunting. It took 1,500 letters sent over the Web, including blueprints and plans, and 70 long-distance conferences to manage just the panels for the $65 million library. Getting past border security was slow at first. U.S. agents X-rayed the 10-centimeter-thick panels--the largest of which weighed more than 3.8 tons--to make sure nothing was hidden inside. They told Pretecsa they might have to break one open. It didn't come to that.

"We were quite impressed. We didn't have any complaints about it all," says Chris Wightman, Salt Lake's assistant project manager for the 21,000-square-meter library. The library, open now one year, won a 2003 concrete industry design award for best public building.