10/26/98 ENTREPRENEUR: ALFONSO ROMO GARZA (int'l edition)

Return to main story

ENTREPRENEUR: ALFONSO ROMO GARZA (int'l edition)

Latin America has not produced a bumper crop of new technologies. Mexican billionaire Alfonso Romo Garza aims to change that. The chairman and majority owner of Pulsar Internacional, a $2.8 billion Monterrey-based holding company, is pushing to make Pulsar a global leader in biotechnology. His company's specialty: hybrid vegetable and fruit seeds that produce high-yield, disease-resistant crops. ''More Mexican companies have to move out of old-style industries and into new technologies,'' Romo says.
For the past four years, Pulsar's agricultural subsidiary, Empresas la Moderna, has been snapping up biotechnology companies around the world. Now, with a global network of 56 biotech labs, Romo boasts one of the world's most extensive seed banks of varieties bred to thrive in many climates.
Romo, 48, a descendant of early-20th-century President Francisco Madero, started in business in the early 1980s with a bakery chain. Backed initially by investors including his father-in-law, a member of Monterrey's powerful business elite, he added a cigarette maker, a packaging company, and an insurer. Trained as an agricultural engineer, Romo helped his tobacco suppliers by passing on hybrid seeds and modern curing methods. But last year, sensing that the global tobacco business was becoming too competitive for local players, he sold the cigarette company to BAT Industries PLC for $1.7 billion. He spent some of that cash this year to buy two distressed Korean seed companies and expand in India. ''We've made a decisive move to become a dominant force in Asia,'' Romo says.
Romo believes Latin companies must focus on growth areas such as financial services and health care as well as high technology. His insurance company, Seguros Comercial America, is the largest in the region. Recently, he started investing in outpatient surgery clinics in Mexico, looking ahead to partial privatization of the state-run health-care system, which he expects will happen soon.
Romo is also avid about using imaginative business planning to solve Mexico's deep-seated poverty. His three-year-old business school, Duxx, supports researchers who dream up development projects for such economically depressed areas as Chiapas. Romo is one of the few prominent investors in that troubled state, where he employs 1,500 people at a tropical research center and in vegetable seedling greenhouses. ''Businesspeople today have to take the initiative to generate ideas and convince the government to go along with them,'' Romo says. To achieve peace in areas like Chiapas, he argues, conditions must be created for real growth.

Return to main story