Judging by Churchill’s phrase that heads his book of memoirs, Hugo Sánchez, 77 years old, is one of the businessmen who they pull the car. Son of a technical school teacher and orphaned by his mother at the age of 4, since he was a child he knew how to protect his brother Carlos and since he was 16 he knew how to live off what his hands generated.
The journey, reflected in Buenos Frutos, memories of half a century of Argentine fruit growingtranscends the protagonist who went through them all and who with a Schumpeterian spirit knew how to sink and rise again. Sánchez is the central figure of Argentine fruit growing and, after the death of his brother during the pandemic, he decided to “get naked” and tell his story.
His father was the director of ENET 1 in Roca (Río Negro) and he began, at a very young age, to work in a mechanical workshop. His entry into fruit growing was from a lucky break.
The meeting at a service station in Villa Regina with the German Ernst Volker Ohlsen, who was looking for fruits in the Valley for a European supermarket chain, changed his life and at the age of 24 Expofrut was born, the company that became the largest exporter of fruits of the countryis in step with innovation and professionalization.
Since then, it has multiplied jobs and generated other companies in the Upper Valley of Río Negro and Neuquén. And it spread to Europe, where it immersed itself in cultivation and marketing techniques.
The 1976 coup d’état and Martínez de Hoz’s exchange rate plan, the devaluations, strikes, roadblocks, extreme frosts, hail, heat stroke, which neither the ship nor the container failed, until the collapse that meant Chernobyl and the decisions that are made from Buenos Aires with ignorance of a regional economy, follow one another.
But it survived the bankruptcy of hundreds of companies in the Valley and continued to grow. There is no recipe in this book, but the resilience of this self-made man is palpable.
The former ambassador to the United States, Fernando Oris de Roa, highlights: “He always knew that the strategy was narrated by his clients and he knew how to listen.” The German Sven Heinsohn notes: ““He ran the risk of failing and losing a lot”.
On December 18, 1980 and at the head of the Valle Business Chamber, Hugo Sánchez organized the first business strike, amidst signatures They were melted by the backward dollar and their debts and a Ministry of Economy that told them: “if the apple is worth little, plant something else.” The military detained him and immediately released him.
At the end of 1983, his life took another turn when, with the help of Haroldo Grisanti, then owner of Tres Ases—one of the leading firms—he met Domingo Cavallo and they inaugurated the company in Alto Valle. first subsidiary of the Mediterranean Foundation outside of Córdoba.
The milestones of his business development, from the first computer and the drive with his father to generate a computer career to the creation of a port with packaging and refrigerated ships in San Antonio Este, when it was shipped from the more expensive Bahía Blanca; he change of fruit varieties oriented to the international marketmark a life without rest.
“We worked from Monday to Saturday full time and on Sundays from 9 to 12 we met to plan the following week,” he writes. With convertibility came the time for new investments and plantations in the Valley. At the end of 1999 he had disagreements with one of his Expofrut partners and set up a new company.
In recent years, acquired the renowned Moño Azul and, in a historic move, he bought back Expofrut, the company he had founded in the 1970s. Currently, generational transfer is one of his focuses in his holding company, Grupo Prima, led by his son Nicolás as CEO.
Sánchez has illusion with the Milei government and emphasizes that in the valleys of Río Negro and Neuquén there is an availability of water that is envied in the fruit growing world, optimal lands and an 80-year-old fruit culture. It synthesizes it in formidable comparative advantages and young producers.
Prima currently contains agribusiness and tourism businesses. It has a vertical integration that goes from the plantation to the table of the European consumer, and that includes packaging plants and meat processing plants. It is the largest exporter of fresh fruit in Patagonia, with 1,400 hectares of pears and apples and 200 hectares of organic kiwi in the Sierra de los Padres of Buenos Aires.
It represents 30% nationally and they are the owners of the emblematic Bahía Manzano complex in Villa la Angostura and the airline company Prima Air.
Twists of fate, the book was presented in the Hirsch Palace which, designed by the English architect John Robert Sutton in 1920, was occupied by Alfredo Hirsch, the executive who transformed Bunge y Born into the largest business conglomerate in Latin America.
Listening to Sánchez, interviewed by Teté Coustarot and Claudio Savoia, were, among others, Domingo Cavallo, Haroldo Grisanti, Miguel Pichetto, Eduardo Jacobs and several members of the Favaloro family, in addition to the current owners of the Palace, Carlos and Mabel Arecco. He drank apple juice.