About
A small firm that reads the rule before it says anything.
Atienza Comércio Exterior is a Brazilian company based in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil. It works on the regulatory side of equipment entering the country: determination, registration holding, local representation and sourcing.
The firm is new. We are not going to pretend otherwise by showing logos, case studies or testimonials we do not have. What we can show is the method and the evidence, which is why this site publishes counts with their sources and dates instead of claims about experience.
Who signs the work
Rodrigo Brito
Founder of both Atienza companies. For the last eight years his work has been reading Brazilian public procurement documents on behalf of the companies that bid on them, mostly on public works: more than five hundred processes, from the side that loses when a clause is missed.
That is a narrower credential than it sounds, and it is the relevant one. A bid document and a compulsory certification ordinance are the same kind of text. Both are written in normative language, both are read by most people as formality, and in both the thing that decides the outcome is usually one subordinate clause that nobody read to the end.
What does not transfer is the sector, and that is stated here rather than dressed up. This firm did not come out of the equipment trade. It came out of reading rules for a living, which is why everything it publishes carries the article it came from.
Work is done in Portuguese and English.
Rules we work by
Four of them, and they cost us work sometimes.
Every figure has a source and a date. If we say a register contains a number, we say which file, how it was counted and when. Anything we did not count ourselves is attributed to whoever did.
Absence of evidence is not evidence. A company missing from a public base may be registered under another object, another corporate name, or outside the rule entirely. We have made that mistake and we now treat it as a question, never a finding.
We do not diagnose a named company to a third party. Not to a competitor, not to a trade association, not to a regulator. What we find about a company is discussed with that company.
The answer can be no. If the equipment is outside compulsory certification, if the market is already served, or if the cost of entry does not justify the volume, we say so. That is an opinion we can deliver honestly; a favourable one we cannot.
The sister company
Atienza Consultoria Empresarial works the Brazilian public procurement side: bid analysis, challenges to bid documents, appeals, qualification and administrative contracts. It is a consultancy, not a law firm. The two firms share an office in Recife and nothing else: different companies, different files, different engagements.
It matters here for one reason. A great deal of imported equipment in Brazil is bought by government: hospitals, municipalities, school transport, universities. When that is where a machine ends up, the regulatory question and the procurement question are the same project seen from two sides.