Carlos Slim Elu is a Mexican billionaire, businessman, one of the richest people on the planet. Interestingly, it was he who was the first in sixteen years to overtake the Americans in the global ranking of billionaires, taking a leading position. According to Forbes magazine, Carlos Slim in 2010 even beat Bill Gates due to the growth in the value of assets of his companies. True, not much, only 500 million dollars. However, this was enough to rich man the planet became Carlos Slim Elu. His fortune is estimated at approximately 53.5 billion dollars. The personal capital of this businessman, according to some media estimates, is about 8 percent of Mexico’s total GDP.
The origin of Carlos Slim
The success story of this billionaire is very informative and interesting. Carlos Slim Elu was born in Mexico City in 1940, on January 28. He was the fifth child in the family of a Lebanese refugee and the daughter of a successful Lebanese merchant. Julian Slim, his father, moved to Mexico in 1902. The fact is that the family wanted to save Julian from military service in the Ottoman Empire.
First million earned
Carlos's father possessed business acumen. In a new place, he went into real estate business. Then, in 1920, Julian acquired real estate in downtown Mexico City and opened a supermarket here. This man managed to establish a successful trading business in Mexico City, in which all six of his children began to work. From them he demanded zeal, talent and devotion. In return, children received large pocket money, which they had to learn to manage from the first grade of school. Carlos had a good business sense. The teenager, with the blessing of his father, began to engage in stock investing, the rules of which he had already mastered at the age of seventeen. It was then that Carlos Slim earned his first million.
University studies
Continuing to work successfully in this direction, he managed to study at the university at the faculty of civil engineering. Carlos Slim taught algebra and linear programming in other courses in other courses. In 1961, he received a diploma, but did not begin to work by profession.
Personal life
In 1966, Carlos married Somaye Domitus Germayel. This girl was also of Lebanese descent. She was a cousin of Gemayel, the Lebanese president. The couple happily married 32 years, until the death of Somaya in 1999. Today, Slim is considered, despite the extra pounds, double chin and old age, an enviable groom. However, he is indifferent to beauties, and the glamorous glory does not appeal to him.
Carlos Strategy
Having accumulated a decent capital, he directed it to the insurance business, as well as to the purchase of hotels and Sanborns stores. Carlos Slim has emphasized in the retail industry to reduce the cost of consumer goods, making them affordable for poor buyers from Mexico. This became the basis of his business, his growing capitalization. Cheap to buy, then upgrade and either sell dearly or join a growing family empire - that’s Mexico’s magnate strategy.
The foundation of the famous holding
The country defaulted in 1982 due to the inability to pay external debt. A massive economic crisis has occurred in Mexico. For a few centimes, investors got rid of their solid assets accumulated. The panic situation took advantage of Carlos Slim, whose biography is the topic of our article.He used the money left from his father and bought up many promising companies for nothing. It was then that the famous investment holding Carso Group was founded. This name is made up of the first syllables of the names of Carlos and Somaya, his wife.
Expansion into various market sectors
The next step was the extraction of coal and ore. Frisco Corporation, which is still part of the Group Carso Syndicate, has become a leader in the country's mining and chemical industries.
By the end of the 1980s, the expansion of Carlos-owned companies into various market sectors had reached such proportions that every second resident of the country, as well as every second company, in one way or another, faced every day at least one of the many structures owned by this millionaire, being consumers goods and services produced by him.
Political assets
Carlos Slim, whose condition was already very great at that time, in addition to economic assets, he also acquired political ones. Informal and friendly character are his contacts with high-ranking officials of Mexico. Among them, the most valuable was the friendship with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the president of this country in 1988-1994. Slim’s detractors claim that the Mexican president’s personal sympathies allegedly benefited the millionaire when the question arose of privatizing the state-owned telecommunications company Telmex, which was at that time, and also many years later, a monopolist in the Mexican communications market.
Telmex Acquisition
De Gortari, pursuing a tough policy of privatizing state-owned enterprises and deregulating the economy, decided to send a number of companies for sale, including Telmex. A group of investors led by Carlos Slim Helu won the tender. Slim paid for the block of shares he received for several years with money from the proceeds received by the acquired company. Carlos, by investing in politics, has provided his business with the support of the Mexican government for years to come.
The shocking fact of acquiring Telmex caused outrage in society, a storm of indignation in government circles and in the press. He led to a series of mass proceedings. The process ended in nothing, but all this time the president was forced to communicate with the public and the government.
Work at Telmex
Meanwhile, Carlos Slim Elu continued to build a financial empire. His biography during these years is marked by the fact that he directed all his strength into work in the acquired company. It took him five years to put it in order: to rebuild the technical base, streamline corporate governance, create a range of services. These efforts were not in vain - the reconstruction carried out in five years allowed the company in 1995 to bypass the national disaster that depreciated the Mexican peso. Telmex, thus, met a new round of development of the Mexican industry not as a decrepit company with government patronage, but as a leader in the country's economy and as a major provider of telecommunications services.
Telmex enjoyed a monopoly in the Mexican market throughout the 1990s. The company even now occupies about 80-90 percent of the country's fixed-line market, as well as about 70% of mobile.
New companies in the holding and new cooperation
The Syndicate Group Carso in 1996 was allocated to a holding company called Carso Global Telecom. The main task was to coordinate the technical, organizational and financial resources of the Elu Group. Subsequently, Condumex, a telecommunications equipment company, was also included in this holding, as well as Prodigy, Mexico's first provider, and also a pioneer of commercial web activities.
Carlos Slim in 1999 invested $ 1.5 billion in control of several US firms operating cellular telephony centers and fiber optic networks in Puerto Rico and Florida.
On shares with SBC in February 2000, he became a co-owner of Network Access Solutions, a well-known Internet service provider. Cooperation with Microsoft has allowed to increase the number of Internet users by 3 times, which led to an increase in sales of computer equipment.
a Christmas gift
Carlos, it should be said, was always afraid of the IT industry and computer technology. However, everything changed Christmas, for which Carlos Slim Elu received a modern laptop as a gift from his sons. Pets were not mistaken with the choice. Perhaps this particular laptop has changed Slim's attitude to the telecommunications segment, which was the reason for working in this direction.
Conquest of the Latin American Market
Carlos eventually began to look for opportunities to expand business outside his country. He sought to conquer the Latin American market. To do this, Slim began to buy up regional telecom operators. In 2000, he acquired a number of telephone operators that went bankrupt due to the financial crisis, which ensured the millionaire a dominant position in the telecommunications services market throughout Latin America.
Carlos Slim today
The mirror of Mexican evolution is Carlos Slim Elu. This is an entrepreneur who uses communications in the state apparatus, while being far from the ideals of free competition and the open market. On the other hand, this is certainly a talented person who is aimed not only at money-grubbing, but also at creation. Telmex, in the end, not only collected all the profits and benefits of the monopolist. Under the leadership of Slim, in the first ten years, the company upgraded its networks, and also quadrupled the number of subscribers. Since the late 1990s and the next ten years, 30 million Mexicans — low-income people — have gained access to mobile communications.
