Conclusions

As we have seen, Latin America is very rich in natural resources and, generally, its labor is cheap, and these are the main ingredients that feed the large companies originating in the region, with rare exceptions. Why does a region so blessed with natural resources and gifts of nature fail to develop and industrialize in the same way that other regions of the world had had such success? We sought to give some explanations for this fact which in our view is owed to the fact that we were not able to generate an expressive number of global companies and this has a lot to do with the nonprofessional way of managing companies which has predominated on our continent and which, happily, has begun to change in the last 20 years, but not with the desired speed. Because of these factors, our continent holds some large powerful companies but almost always in sectors that were important in the nineteenth century and stopped being relevant in this twenty-first century. Being a global actor in sectors like drinks, cement, mining, agriculture, fishing, or steel is not all bad, but it is not enough. As we have seen, the more advanced countries present companies in the sectors that today dominate the world economy such as the telephony, software, hardware, medical equipment, or pharmaceutical industry. In other words, we could say that even the large Latin American companies, generally, are out of the sectors of high technology, with rare exceptions such as the Brazilian Embraer or the Mexican Mabe. Companies on our continent, when they can have size and projection, to perform in the international market are in sectors of low or little technology, in the majority of the cases producing commodities; Petrobras and CEMEX are excellent examples.