Los Angeles World Affairs Council Luncheon With Speaker Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego

The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with the Los Angeles World affairs Council hosted an invitation only luncheon, at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel, in Century City.  The topic of the business luncheon: The Bottom of the Pyramid to the Rescue of the Global Economy.

Could a “trickle-up recovery” be the solution to the current global crisis?  If you were to ask Ricardo B. Salinas, one of Latin America’s leading corporate figures and entrepreneurs you would most definitely get an intriguing, carefully considered and well-informed answer.

Salinas, took a small family-owned business and transformed in into a national corporation.  Salinas has profoundly made a mark on Latin America’s economic system and encouraged the progress of the country of Mexico to move toward modernization, by creating new markets among its working classes.  

As chairman and founder of Grupo Salinas—which includes several of the largest companies in Mexico—Salinas successfully spearheaded the promotion of the country’s free trade, government deregulation, and foreign investment.  

In 1906, Grupo Salinas began as a family-owned furniture manufacturing company, Salinas & Rocha.  In 1950, Salinas’ grandfather created Grupo Elektra, and in 1987, Ricardo Salinas took over the helm as its CEO.  As the devaluation of the peso began to spiral Mexico’s economy downward, Salinas successfully averted Elektra‘s financial distress by refocusing on basic products such as appliances, electronics and furniture.

By developing Elektra as a vast new consumer market among Mexico’s lower middle income consumers, Salinas was able to provide credit sales, diverse financial products and services.  Grupo Elektra further expanded to become Mexico’s biggest consumer-finance company when, in 2002, it won the first banking license granted to any Mexican institution in nearly a decade. The strategy was to build new consumer markets by creating new buying power among classes of people, who until then, had been largely ignored by the majority of other major Mexican businesses.

Salinas is listed in Forbes magazine  as one of the world’s richest Billionaires.  

In 1997, he formed the non-profit  Fundación Azteca, to address a broad range of problems such as healthcare, nutrition, education and protection of the environment.

Salinas serves as the chairman of TV Azteca, one of the world’s two largest producers of the Spanish- language TV programming.  It is also one of  two nationwide broadcasters in Mexico, and now considered to be the most profitable integrated broad- caster in the world. Under Salinas, TV Azteca broke through barriers of Mexico’s long- standing television monopoly with the  networks Azteca 13 and Azteca 7.

In 2001, TV Azteca launched Azteca America, a Spanish-language broadcasting network that  focuses on 40 million-plus Hispanics in the U.S., with affiliates in 62 markets like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, and Houston.  Azteca America reaches 89 percent of the Hispanic population in the U.S.   Unefon, another Grupo Salinas telecommunications company has around 1.4 million subscribers and hits 19 cities with its own network and an additional 23,000 urban areas through a capacity exchange and roaming agreement it has with Grupo Iusacell—a company that Salinas purchased from Verizon  and Vodafone in 2003.  Started by Salinas in 2000, Telecosmo has now become Mexico’s first wireless broadband ISP.

By Suzanne Takowsky