Where is carlos slim helu from

When you left your country without knowing the language of the other country, without knowing the culture, without knowing where you are going, and you are only 14 years old, you should be very strong and you get stronger with this. I think immigrants in general are very, very hard workers and very strong inside themselves. They should be very strong. I admire immigrants from anywhere. When you were growing up, did you have heroes? Were there people you looked up to who influenced you? Carlos Slim: My father was very strong.

His personality, his kindness, how he was strong and firm when he needed to be firm. How he was also lovely, a lover. And my mother. I think my father was very important, like I told you, especially because he died. Maybe there were some teachers I admired. Some teachers, some sportsmen that made very strong achievements. I think it was very important. And other people that made achievements, like they want to swim the Channel in Europe. Mainly sportsmen. Carlos Slim: I think I always know that I was going to be a businessman, because I began to invest when I was ten or 12 years old.

I began to make my first investments. I opened my checking account and I was already investing very young. I think I knew that. Carlos Slim: My father would give us five pesos every week, and when you have a birthday or something and they give money to you, you need to make something with that, with your savings, and you can have it physically, but you can also put them in the bank, and I went to the investments.

That means that you have savings and you need to make something with them. Then you begin to think what to do with them and you invest them. In those days, you made the decision very young.

I was 14 years old. I selected engineering, because I liked numbers. I think some people like letters and others like numbers. To some, the letters tell them something. To others, numbers tell you something. Carlos Slim: Yes, I did.

I finished. I have my title of engineering, and I was a teacher in the engineering school where I was studying. Engineering studies is very important. You know that not everything is exact. You know that science comes from experiments also. I made a construction company. I was involved in a mining company. Engineering is a very strong basis for business, I think.

But how did you get started on the road to being so incredibly successful as a businessman? Carlos Slim: Well first, I think the success is not to make money or to have companies or to be an outstanding professional. The success is your life. The success is your family, your friends. In this way I think I have been very successful, because of my sisters, my brothers, and especially because of my family, my children, my wife, and my friends.

Professionally, I studied, like I told you, engineering, but I liked economy, and when I was in the last years I was thinking to study some economy. Actually, when I finished I took courses in economy. Three months at first, and then another three months in Chile.

I went to study there. I have curiosity for many things. I have interests for many things. When you study engineering, I studied some economy. I decided to take, when I was 24, a sabbatical year, to look at what I was going to do. To think, to travel, after I studied economy and I made my engineer career. From the beginning I was involved in many businesses. I bought a bottling company. I make an investment firm, a construction company, real estate company, and I begin with five or six different areas of work.

There are three different persons. But in the small business, regularly the same person makes the three things. It is the investor, it is the businessman — the entrepreneur — and the executive, the CEO. I was very clear that CEO and businessman is different, and the investors are different. And as much as I followed my career, I worked with executives. My work like a businessman was to work with executives, with CEOs, to make them develop these capabilities.

During this sabbatical year, you took time off to think about what you wanted to do with your life. Is that correct? Carlos Slim: In some ways, and in other ways — not to relax completely — but to have a compromise. To be free to think, to travel, to read. And I went to Europe. Traveling, studying, reading and thinking. Carlos Slim: The only thing that happened is that I met the woman that was going to be my wife, but there was no changes because of this year in my life.

What was your first venture? Once you started acquiring companies, how did you get started? Carlos Slim: I bought, with my brother, a bottling company of soft drinks in two states, Morenos and Guerrero. I formed a construction company with a classmate. Is this something that is instinctive? Is it something that you learn from experience? Is it something that you learned as a student? How do you account for this ability? Carlos Slim: We look at potential development of the company.

To buy it at a low price and in bad condition, it makes it easier. But the good thing is the potential of the company. How far it can go. How far you can develop the company. Look at the numbers. Like I told you, numbers talk. And we have a philosophy of working that makes these things not very difficult, because when you work with austerity, sobriety and you invest in equipment and you reinvest.

There are, I think, some basic rules. Nothing magic. Only basic rules to find out which are the conditions of the company and help to change them. But what is clear also for me is that you can do it very fast. You can do it very fast and the faster you do that, the best it is for the business, for the company, for the people involved, to make that.

Well, you need to work in the whole area, not only finance, not to look only at one area. You need to look at labor, your treatment with people. You need to look that the people should be feeling good in the work they are doing, to be motivated to be there, to have the spirit to be in the company. And you look also at sales. You look at production. You look at finance. You need to look at the whole company and arrange the areas where things are doing bad.

In some companies, you have a lot of levels of management. Many levels are not working for the operation. They have quarters far from the operation. Corporations, the corporation is outside the operation. We work without corporative people. We focus an operation. We take down as many levels as we can, to make the highest level be near the operation.

With practice and experience we make a team that is very efficient, and we do that very fast. I think it is not instinct. We have nearly , people working in the group, and we have a lot of young men doing these kinds of jobs.

That takes basic rules of management to do that, no? The biographies of some people and what they do, and you can take the good things from them. Not everything, no. And the experience — you can, I think, have experience from the failures of others and your failures, no? And what we do when we are managing business is that we all need to take decisions, but we try to do small mistakes. We are very, very open to small mistakes. A big mistake is very dangerous.

A very big mistake is bad, but small mistakes make the people trained, and they learn how to take decisions and move ahead. Do you see yourself as a risk-taker? Is it important in life to be willing to take a risk? Carlos Slim: In my opinion, I never take risks.

Maybe small risks, but I think I am not a risk taker. I think I am very conservative. All my life I have been very conservative. Maybe my challenges were not economic or financial, but professional.

We took on very strong challenges, but the big risk was not economic, it was professional, not to fail in these big challenges.

In any profession, in any career, there are bound to be some failures. Have you suffered setbacks? Have you suffered failures? How do you deal with that? Carlos Slim: Well yes, but like I said, small mistakes or small failures. We take small failures very often. We have failures in investment. We have failures in operation, but no big mistakes or big failures. How do we take that? Like ordinary business.

What gave you the courage to do that? Carlos Slim: Well, it was in I was 42 years old. I had good experience, and there were many factors that made it very clear that I should do that. My father was very young.

He had no family. He was not married. He was without so much roots in the country, and he stayed in Mexico, and you cannot make any comparison with the revolution. Yet, he invested during that time, and he worked hard in this time after to during all these times. When you read about what happened, in the U. We had a big problem in the s because the fiscal deficit was very high, but also because the interest rates went above It was 21 or 22 prime rate.

The price of the companies was crazy. Not only the values were very low. That was really very, very low. It was crazy. Very, very low. There were available businesses to buy. Also, there is a group, a person or through the bank, that the controller of the companies is there.

In these years, the U. The banks sold the assets, and many people wanted to sell everything, and we were the only buyers. That is one of the reasons I got so complex a group with so many sectors, because these businesses were available, one day after the other.

For me, it was very clear that a company that has a debt in foreign currency also has assets in foreign currency, and it was an accounting problem.

But if you make the investment the next day after the devaluation, it is just accounting. There are also accounting problems that make you think that things are worse than what they are. I think it was a very important experience, what my father had done. I know the history of Mexico, how we had problems in the past, from the 19th century, and the experience of the economies and the markets when you get a depression, a recession. Economic cycles makes sense in agricultural civilization when you have good weather and bad weather.

That sometimes you are very euphoric, very positive, very optimistic, and you get to the euphoria, and everything goes up, up, up, and a lot of inflation of assets and crazy things. In some ways, something is happening. And in the other way, you are pessimistic.

You are depressed, and everything is bad. You know, a country that has a problem with prices — after a devaluation, prices are very down, very low, they need to come back to have investments. There is an overshoot of the currency and some other conditions, and we have done when — we are very clear that we are not speculators or investors in a short term. We are looking for a long-term plan. We invest more. Could you tell us how you overcame a challenge from a competitor?

What was difficult about that? When any international company can come in, while you stay only in your own market, he can corner you, because he can move the prices as he likes, just to destroy your market position. So we decided to go where he was. It was a pity. We told our managers — the ones who want to be international — we gave them a special, accelerated training, because they were going to go to other countries. We began in a small part of Brazil, then Colombia and Ecuador and Guatemala.

Many countries. When you went into those countries, did you acquire a company and then put your managers in charge, or did you start from the grassroots?

From the ground up? Carlos Slim: Well, depending. If some company is available on good terms, we buy the company, and in other places, we buy the license, and we begin with zero, work from the grassroots, like you say. That was the case of Uruguay. In Brazil, there are many regions. In some regions, we buy a company there, in other regions, we buy the license. To do an acquisition, as opposed to starting from the grassroots, there are positives and negatives about both of those.

Is one easier to do or better? Carlos Slim: Depending on the price that you are paying. You need to create not only the infrastructure and the investments, you need to create the human team, the people.

You need also to create your dealer organization, the dealers that are going to sell your products. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Executive Lifestyle. Katie Warren. The year-old Mexican billionaire controls America Movil, the largest mobile-phone operator in Latin America, and holds stakes in several other publicly traded companies, including The New York Times. Slim also owns Sears Mexico, which has been growing and opening up new stores despite the chain filing for bankruptcy in the US.

Slim lives a surprisingly frugal lifestyle for a billionaire: He doesn't own any yachts or planes and he's lived in the same house for more than 40 years. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In , Slim ranked as the fifth-richest person in the world, but his fortune has taken a major hit over the past few years. He also has holdings in banking and mining, as well as interests in the construction industry in Mexico. Slim was born to Lebanese immigrant parents in Mexico City in Slim's father was successful in both retail and real estate, and Carlos inherited his business after his death in Slim holds a deep love for his country.

Though Slim is known best as the chief shareholder of America Movil and the founder of the Grupo Carso conglomerate, his riches also result from many other business ventures. Slim has a clear strategy for making money: He acquires struggling companies and transforms them into multibillion-dollar holdings before selling his stake at a profit.

But Slim announced in that he would sell almost half his New York Times shares by In , Slim surpassed Bill Gates as the richest man in the world; it was the first time in 16 years that the world's richest man wasn't from the US.

Slim's presence is all over Mexico. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors.

What do you do with your money when you're one of the world's wealthiest individuals? Slim confesses to preferring the simple life, and his lifestyle may seem less extravagant than other billionaires.

Still, Slim has been a savvy investor and businessman making sure that his fortune continues to grow. A man like Carlos Slim doesn't just keep billions of dollar bills stacked in a vault someplace. Here is where this billionaire stashes some of his money. Slim holds stakes in many Mexican companies through his conglomerate, Grupo Carso. Carso has accumulated a global portfolio of investments in companies dealing in communications, real estate, construction, airlines, media, technology, retailing, restaurants, industrial production, and finance.

Slim also has investments in various South American firms in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, including a controlling interest in Banco Inbursa. In Mexico, he owns over 20 shopping centers, including ten in Mexico City, and operates stores in the country under U.

The property is included in the National Register of Historic Places. He also has approximately eight acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards.

Carlos Slim's everyday car is a custom Mercedes 4x4, which he likes to drive by himself even through heavy Mexico City traffic, and a beefed-up Chevy Suburban for more rugged occasions. He also owns a rare Bentley Continental Flying Spur, a powerful luxury sedan.

Although he eschews private jets, Slim does fly occasionally on commercial airplanes, and sometimes he rides in the Telmex helicopter. While it's certainly an achievement to own one-of-a-kind real estate and rare cars, it is another to own precious, irreplaceable collectibles. By the time he turned 12, Slim had bought shares in a bank. He studied civil engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico while taught linear programming and algebra there. That firm expanded in the coming years.

Slim remembered the lesson his father had taught him and as his firm grew, he lived in a modest way with his family. He used his profits to re-invest in other businesses. In the following decades, Slim acquired companies that he thought were underrated and astutely renovated their management.