Spanish economist, born in Madrid sixty-three years ago, with more than forty years of professional experience divided between industry and the financial markets.
I spent the first eighteen years in industrial and service companies, all of them large multinationals. I began at Wandel & Goltermann, a German company in telecommunications technology. There I learned that technology positions a company strategically at least five years before the wider public notices. Then came logistics, with the Australian firm Mayne Nickless, in London, where I found that supply chains matter to a business as much as its customers do: if you do not deliver on time, those customers do not survive in your profit and loss account. And finally defence, at Expal — once a shunned sector, now the fashionable one. Everyone believes they understand it, but if you have not lived inside it, understanding it is impossible. Those years were without doubt among the most absorbing of my career. Nothing is what it is said to be, and not even what it appears to be. In parallel, during my years in England, I taught business valuation and strategy at Boston College, where I discovered that sharing your experience is more than a pleasure: it is an obligation. Since then I have taught at many universities and given a great many lectures, on all sorts of subjects, in a great many countries. It seems remarkable, but what preoccupies people differs far more than one would expect depending on where they study or live.
The last twenty-five years I have devoted to managing investment funds. The experience gained in industry has been, and remains, very useful for understanding how value is created, beyond simple numerical analysis. That is critical when deciding where and how to invest, and it has led me to develop an analytical method of my own, which we use not only in the companies I run but which I also try to share with students at university.
Along the way I have set up companies in sixteen countries across four continents and closed strategic alliances in twenty-four. I have served on boards and supervisory bodies in Spain and in other countries of Europe, in the United States, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Above all, first-hand experience has shown me that investment is not analysed from the comfort of an office chair, but on the ground: meeting the people who take the decisions and understanding why they take them, and meeting the politicians who set the stage on which the work is done.
Today I combine fund management — both UCITS and alternative investment — with university teaching and public analysis of economic and geopolitical affairs. I write an opinion column and publish company analyses and technical notes. I contribute regularly to the media on investment, macroeconomics and geopolitics, and I lecture at universities and professional forums.
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