When China began to show its overwhelming strength as a centre of global manufacturing and the economic slowdown that first hit the US started spreading south in 2001, many people thought that Mexico’s maquiladora sector was doomed.

The name refers to the model by which successive Mexican administrations had attracted US businesses to set up assembly operations south of the border for re-export to the US, taking advantage of cheap Mexican labour. It had appeared incapable of competing with the threat from Asia.