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Stopping A Bullet
A grizzled gun-club member takes aim at the Insulgard panel with an M-16. He misses, and the audience full of bored cops hoots. Next shot goes dead center ... and stops. Insulgard, a transparent sandwich of bullet-resistant Lexgard plastic and air, has blocked yet another deadly projectile. What's left is just a splattered lead dimple on the polycarbonate surface.
Barber, who works out of an office in Clearwater, supervises Commercial Plastics' sale of security products, primarily to foreign customers but also to domestic ones like the audience at the St. Pete gun club.
Insulgard's effectiveness at stopping high-powered weapons - and even withstanding explosions - has made it a hit, so to speak, in South America, where the security end of the company's business had sales of more than $10 million last year. That's a profitable adjunct to Commercial's more traditional, $20 million-a-year business in Central and South America, selling plastics for commercial and industrial uses. Commercial Plastics stumbled into the South American security business about seven years ago by winning bids to install protective panels in the U.S. embassies in Lima and Santiago. While banks and government offices now account for much of the company's security business in the region, Commercial Plastics sometimes is hired to install its transparent, bullet-resistant panels in private homes.
"We had one rich guy in Argentina with a beautiful house that had a three-story, round-glass elevator," remembers Barber. "On one level, believe it or not, this elevator even went through his pool. The guy wanted the elevator to be bullet-resistant to a level seven, which is practically explosion-proof. So you look at this elevator now and it looks perfectly normal - till you realize the walls are two inches thick."
Barber says the South American market for what he calls "transparent protection" is only increasing. "I was in S?o Paulo, Brazil, a few weeks ago, and they'd just had 114 bank robberies in a single week," says Barber. "We've been asked to put a model of our security system in one bank that's been robbed eight times. It's in a pretty bad part of town."
Brazil, Barber says, is a bit of a laggard on security issues. By contrast, in Chile, laws require that anyone handling more than a certain amount of money has either a guard or physical protection; as a result, Insulgard has been installed in about 1,000 Banco O'Higgins and Citibank branches throughout that country. In addition to banks, Commercial Plastics' clientele in South America includes armored car operators. Barber says there is a growing replacement market for armored cars because even empty ones are hijacked by criminals who need secure ways to transport their cash. "In Colombia, there's 800 pesetas to the dollar," he says. "So, for the dollar equivalent, you're going to have a lot of cash. How are you going to carry it?"
Business Beat - Week of May 3rd
