On August 1,
CE Mobility of Johannesburg, South Africa joined the Kien Tuong Private Enterprise Wheelchair Company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to become the second factory to produce a quality certified Whirlwind RoughRider™ in high volumes.
Two other factories.
Fundación Bertha O. de Osete in San Juan Del Rio, Mexico, and Pinnacle Industries of Indore, India, are expected to come online and be quality certified this Fall. Most of the production in Mexico and India will likely be destined for their own national markets;
Kien Tuong and CE Mobility are each currently filling orders destined for Iraq and will export to other developing countries as well. The four factories are expected to produce about 15,000 RoughRiders™ in 2009, and up to 30,000 annually by 2011.
Quality Certification
The Vietnam and South Africa factories have met our quality certification standards for safety, strength, and durability. These mass produced chairs remain fathful to our longstanding design criteia of low cost local repairability. One of Whirlwind’s responsibilities to our franchisees is help in finding buyers for their chairs.
We retain a small portion of each sale to fund our ongoing quality control, design, and expansion programs.
Mexico
Established in 1996, the Fundación Bertha O. de Osete I.A.P., producing under the Movi brand, has been working with Whirlwind for nearly a decade. In March 2008, Whirlwind and Bertha agreed to move forward with the introduction of the RoughRiders™.
The initial tech transfer occurred in
July. We are currently testing the preproduction prototypes to ensure quality.
India
Last Fall, Whirlwind and the BMVSS company of Jaipur, India signed an agreement to build the RoughRider™ at Pinnacle Industries in Indore, India.
Pinnacle makes office and automotive seating and also molds the famous “Jaipur foot.” Profits from the sale of RoughRiders™ will be
used by BMVSS to subsidize the cost of artificial limbs. Both BMVSS and Whirlwind are past “Tech Laureates” of the San Jose Museum of Technology, and this collaboration is one of only a few among award nominees.
All four of the factories employ many wheelchair users as well as people with hearing and speech impairments. CE Mobility has outsourced production of our wheelchair brakes to JOCOD,
the Johannesburg Council for the Disabled, a job training center for adults with disabilities.
