Dr. Martens says goodbye to Colombia

The classic boot brand Dr. Martens announced that it will end its official representation in Colombia and throughout Latin America, basing the measure on global corporate decisions that led to the exit of the company throughout the region.

“We say goodbye thanking the entire Dr. Martens Colombia community, all our clients, artists, friends, allies and collaborators,” the brand communicated.

The company reported that, just as Colombia was the first country with official representation of this legacy in Latin America, now they will be in charge, 15 years later, “of closing this great story; global corporate decisions terminate the operation in the region”.

This would not be the first brand to leave Colombia in recent months, as Dr. Martens is accompanied by other companies that, for different reasons, have closed operations and announced their departure from the country.

One of those is the e-commerce firm Shopee, which has already indicated that it is closing local operations in Chile, Colombia and Mexico, and would leave Argentina entirely. However, Sea’s e-commerce division announced that it will maintain cross-border operations in the first three markets, but that it will end its teams in the aforementioned countries, which would affect the jobs they generated.

Shopee CEO Chris Feng wrote to employees that “in light of the current heightened macroeconomic uncertainty,” the company needed to “focus resources on core operations” and was therefore determined to focus on a cross-border model. in Shopee Mexico, Colombia and Chile. Therefore, the latter will be the commercial relationship that the brand will maintain at a national level.

And it is that Sea showed how its market value skyrocketed to more than US $ 200,000 million last October, when its gaming and e-commerce units increased in popularity during the pandemic; but the reality is that his shares have since plummeted and are now worth $27 billion.

“Thank you for everything you have contributed to Shopee Colombia. I have had the honor of working alongside a great team and I know you will continue to do a great job no matter what your next role is. Although our journey together has been shorter than we expected, we are grateful to have shared it with you”, this was the message addressed to all his collaborators.

Other companies leaving Colombia, in this case due to going into liquidation, are Conhime SAS, Justo & Bueno and Just Eat Takeway. The first company is under judicial liquidation before the Superintendency of Companies. The company is mainly engaged in the construction of civil engineering works. What happened is that, according to Supersociedades, it is pointed out that during the business reorganization the construction company went from having assets of $10,323 million in the recovery process to a total absence of its assets, with a report of $0.

Therefore, Conhime will be one of the companies that will no longer be in Colombia, since by 2023 it will no longer have a local commercial registry.

Justo & Bueno, for its part, has been a widely known case. The low-cost supermarket chain entered a financial crisis after the economic effects of the pandemic. It entered the process of reorganization in order to save itself, but in the midst of waiting for investors to rescue it and unfulfilled promises, the discounter finally officially went into liquidation. The chain was left with debts of $1.7 billion and more than 5,322 affected employees, as well as suppliers and landlords of more than 1,000 stores. As reported by Supersociedades, since 2019, insolvency applications by companies have increased 41 percent.

Just Eat Takeway withdraws not only from Colombia, but from South America, due to evidence of a decrease in demand for homes.