Carlos Slim Helu, The Richest Conglomerate in Latin America
Carlos became the largest conglomerate in Latin America thanks to the business octopus he has nurtured since the 1970s.
Carlos Slim Helu’s profile and wealth are interesting to review. Carlos is a billionaire and philanthropist in Mexico, he has several times been named the richest man in the world by Forbes.
Meanwhile, the Bloomberg Billionaire Index places Carlos in 11th place in the ranks of the richest people in the world, making him the richest person in Latin America. Forbes noted that Carlos’ wealth reached USD 81.2 billion.
Nearly half of the issuers listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange are companies under the auspices of Carlos’s conglomerate. He founded the largest conglomerate company in Mexico, namely Grupo Carso.
What is the profile and wealth of Carlos Slim Helu?
Profile and Wealth of Carlos Slim Helu
Carlos Slim Helu was born on January 28, 1940, in Mexico City. Since childhood, he has shown interest in the business world and asked his father to teach him important subjects in business, such as management, finance, and accounting.
The lessons helped him to analyze and interpret financial statements. At the age of 11, Carlos invested his money in government bonds. Then at the age of 12, he bought his first stock.
Carlos is actually an engineer, but his interest remains in economics. Carlos himself admits that the knowledge of algebra and linear programming that he studied in college seems to have helped him in making business decisions.
After graduating, Carlos started his career as a stock trader for the first time. The profit from his personal investment reached USD 400,000 in 1965. During the same period, Carlos began to lay the foundations for his future conglomerate group, Grupo Carso.
In the early days, Carlos targeted the food and beverage industry, real estate, mining, and others, as his business focus. It wasn’t long before Carlos expanded his business diversification into the financial, telecommunications, tobacco, hospitality, and other sectors.
Carlos made a fortune in the early 1990s when the Mexican government began to dismantle its telecommunications industry. Through Grupo Carso, Carlo bought Telmex. As of 2006, Telmex operated 90% of the telephone lines in all of Mexico. Meanwhile, Telcel, another of Carlos’ companies, operates 80% of the cell phones in Mexico.
Carlos began to expand to America after 2000, he bought some shares of Barnes & Noble, Office Max, and others. Currently, Carlos Slim Helu is listed as the largest shareholder in the New York Times.
Carlos’s family business octopus is so rampant in Mexico, in almost every strategic sector, that the joke ‘There’s nothing else to acquire in Mexico’ appears when Carlos is asked why he is expanding to America.
Thus a piece of information about the profile and wealth of Carlos Slim Helu, the largest conglomerate in Mexico, whose assets reach tens of billions of US dollars.