The name of a small but confident company from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu has inspired confidence among Latin American clients in Peru, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Argentina, who have given it orders worth $500,000 for textile machinery. And this, perhaps, is only the beginning.

Confidence is embedded in the name of the company itself -- Confident Engineering (www.confidentengineering.com. E-mail: confidentindia@gmail.com). More precisely it is the self-confidence of Rathnakumar, the managing director of the company who has managed to inspire the confidence of the textile companies of South America.

The engineer-entrepreneur spent the last month in Argentina, Peru and Ecuador, having come with a delegation of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) June 28. He leaves Buenos Aires July 31, having spent 10 days in each country. He plans to come back to the region in the next three months and target Brazil and Colombia.

Rathnakumar has appointed dynamic and proactive agents in these three countries, who took him to over 30 textile plants. He convinced the technical staff and management of some of these companies that he could help them reduce their cost of production with his dyeing and finishing and effluent treatment machinery, which costs just half as those they import from Europe.

He carried a small prototype of his effluent water treatment plant and gave demonstrations to clients using their plant wastewater. Confident Engineering has innovated a new technology to treat wastewater of dyeing plants through an electro-coagulation method without the use of chemicals. They are applying for a patent for this.

In Peru, he got an order for $70,000 for a machine that he has never made so far. He showed the client a French machine in a Peruvian plant and told him he could make a similar one. The client was convinced by the confident competence of Rathnakumar and gave him the order.

What difference did he find doing business with South American clients? He says here they don't want to open letters of credit. Most of them prefer to deal in cash. They pay an advance amount and the rest later. They retain a percentage of payment as guarantee for performance of his machine. Of course, Latin American importers open letters of credit for large orders.

Confident Engineering is a small-scale enterprise with a turnover of just $1.5 million and 40 employees. Their machines cost $20,000-$100,000. Rathnakumar, an electronics engineer who worked with Larsen and Toubro for six months, and his partner started it in 2003 with an investment of $20,000.

He got a breakthrough in Bangladesh for his dyeing and finishing machines. Now he has set up a full-fledged office in Dhaka to manage supply of machines and service them.