Biography: Carlos Slim Helú
Carlos Slim is widely believed to be the richest man in the world. He has gained most of his wealth as the result of the massive economic growth that Mexico has been going through in recent years. He was able to invest heavily at a time when the Mexican economy was a disaster and these investments are now paying off and making Carlos Slim a very wealthy man.
Carlos Slim was born in Mexico City in 1940 the son of two Lebanese immigrants. His father had founded a small dry goods company when he arrived in Mexico thirty years earlier and this would be the foundation on which Slim would build his wealth. His father's company had been very profitable and those profits were largely invested in real estate in what would later become Mexico City's commercial district. The result is that by the time that Slim graduated from college and took over running the company it was already worth millions.
Carlos Slim got his start in business by continuing to run the business that his father had started and by investing in mining and construction companies. At the time mining was the backbone of the Mexican economy so this proved to be a wise decision. In the early eighties however Mexico found itself in real economic trouble and would ultimately have to resort to devaluing the peso to manage its debts. While this was a disaster for most people it would prove to be a stroke of luck for Carlos Slim. Through his other businesses he was sitting on large amounts of cash, in US dollars, he was able to use this to buy up some of the largest companies in Mexico at bargain prices.
One of the companies that Slim bought was Telemex the nation's telephone company. This was done in partnership with a couple of other companies but since they were buying the government's monopoly they found themselves in a position of controlling over ninety percent of the nations phone lines. Even now with no monopoly in place they still hold the vast majority of the phone lines. Needless to say this has proven to be quite profitable for Carlos Slim.
While Telemex proved to be very profitable it is no longer the largest part of Slims wealth. This position is now held by what started out as the wireless subsidiary of the company. Realizing that wireless was the wave of the future Telemex founded a wireless arm that bought up a number of companies around Mexico. This was followed by the purchase of companies all around Latin America. Eventually the branch was spun off as a separate company when it got larger than its parent. Eventually it would get so big that it would attempt to buy Telemex, but the deal was killed by the regulators.