Juan-Miguel Villar Mir receives Businessperson of the Year award from the Financiero Génova Club

Juan-Miguel Villar Mir has been awarded “Businessperson of the Year 2010” by the Financiero Genova Club in recognition of his business career. Attending the event were the Lieutenant General of the Spanish Airforce, Jose Julio Rodriguez Fernandez, the Chief of Defence Staff (JEMAD); Juan Antonio Sagardoy, president of the Financiero Genova Club; Claudio Boada, president of the Circle of Business, who conducted a presentation of Juan-Miguel Villar Mir; and other personalities.

Juan-Miguel Villar Mir began his speech on the subject of the satisfactory results presented by the Group, home to his business activities, in the year 2010, a year of “serious difficulty for many Spanish companies”, bearing witness once again to the growth of their sales, created funds, and profit at an accumulated annual rate of around 20%. In this regard, he stated that 2011 “also difficult and adverse for the economy will be another satisfactory year for our group.”

Company history

The President of the Villar Mir Group informed the audience that his business career had begun in 1968 when he took up the reins of Hydro-Nitro, a company that at that time was in bankruptcy. With him at the head, the company managed to “increase its share value tenfold over the course of a year and develop a regular pace of growth and profit. ” This action, he went on, gave him the initial prestige of being a “saviour” of companies and paved the way for subsequent opportunities over the following 20 years to be in charge of industrial companies from a variety of sectors.

At the end of that period, Juan-Miguel Villar Mir recounted, in 1987 he decided to create his own industrial group, a group that, after purchasing Obrascón, departed from zero equity.

Today the Villar Mir Group is structured in six divisions: electrometallurgy, energy, basic chemicals and fertilizers, real estate, construction and concessions and financial assets and bases its growth on R & D and internationalization, being that, as he pointed out, “in a global context, characterized by technological advances and globalization, an industrial group that wants to succeed must make technological progress and internationalization its first focus.”

He recounted that the Group of which he is president has developed significant technology. He made reference to the ELSA electrode, used in the production of silicon metal allowing significant energy savings and preventing the contamination of the silicon; to the creation of a new technology for manufacturing strontium nitrate which is the raw material for flat screen computers and televisions; and, thirdly, the new advances made in the production of solar photovoltaic grade silicon metal, raw material for the construction of solar photovoltaic panels.

With respect to internationalization, he pointed out that the Villar Mir Group is currently present in 31 countries on all five continents thanks to the strong growth achieved with major business acquisitions in many different countries.