RIP

I just read  that Lorenzo Zambrano passed away.

Lorenzo Hormisdas Zambrano Treviño was a Mexican businessman. He took over Cemex, a regional cement company founded by his grandfather, and transformed it into one of the largest cement groups in the world.

He was born on March 27 1944 in Monterrey, Mexico and died on a business trip on May 12 2014 in Madrid, Spain. He stayed single all his life.
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Zambrano was a fearless man with superb vision and unbelievable guts. With the ample proceeds from his well protected Mexican home market (his local customers were none too happy with his commercial policies)  he built significant positions in North America, in scores of  European countries, in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century he was by far the best strategist among  the cement industry leaders, and he was the common ennemy of most of his competitors. One of the reasons was that  he played by his own rules, sometimes with what appeared to be trumped cards, and damn the others. But anyway he played in a higher league than most of his competitors.

The man colored a large part of my carreer as a strategy analyst in one of the competing groups. I have not always been able to appreciate his actions, but I have developed a lot of respect for the man.
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He undoubtedly was one of the greatest Mexican entrepreneurs of the last twentieth and the early 21st century. May he rest in peace.