This is the same question asked by small and medium-sized companies, who consider themselves relegated and with very little representation, especially in the hydrocarbon extraction and production industry.
This week I had the opportunity to talk with several of them. From anonymity, they request that they be taken into account in productive projects under business schemes that are flexible, considering the size of their organizations and that do not have the liquidity or the legal apparatus that any corporate entity has.
The situation for them is critical. In addition to the pandemic that rarefied all businesses this year, the drop in the price of crude oil led to an automatic belt tightening throughout the chain.
Some of them live in a constant functional bankruptcy that only gives them to pay some payroll and their mortgage. They cry out for attention, help. They tell me that efforts to upload them to large projects have been unsuccessful, except for some cases counted in Tabasco, where national content development programs have been effective, but no more. Resources come to them in droppers and “we don’t know where the work is going, who to talk to; the large operators, the oil companies, do not consider us in their calls, we do not even find out, ”says a source with more than 18 years of experience as a service provider.
The situation is critical, “there is a complete lack of coordination between all the actors and levels of government. Mexican SMEs do not exist. They are applying mechanisms to comply with the national content quotas, but the work is not really reaching us, ”another interviewee tells me.
Rare, there are 111 current exploration and production contracts that are being administered by the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), while organizations such as Amexhi, which groups contractors, ensure that everything is in order. “Where is work going?” Reiterates the source.
In the following year many things will be put on the table for analysis, and many others will be transformed, here a pending issue that needs to be included in the government’s plan for the energy sector.
By 2021, the government is thus faced with the possibility of taking as its flag the development of national content in the energy industry, a link in the chain that has been relegated during past governments, but that in the face of an official discourse that holds national sovereignty as its main shield, support for Mexican companies, especially SMEs, should be a priority for the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
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