Ricardo Salinas

Ricardo Benjamín Salinas Pliego (born 19 October 1955) is a Mexican businessman, founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas, a corporate conglomerate with interests in telecommunications, media, financial services, and retail.

He is the third richest person in Mexico and the 172nd richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$14.6 billion in 2023.

The majority of Salinas’s fortune is derived from his stakes in two publicly traded companies: Grupo Elektra, a retail and banking conglomerate, and TV Azteca, a Spanish-language broadcaster.

Salinas and his family own 75% of Grupo Elektra and 66% of TV Azteca, according to the companies’ 2022 annual reports. He sold his half of closely held Iusacell, Mexico’s third-largest mobile phone carrier, to AT&T for $1.7 billion in January 2015.

The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.

Daniel McCosh, a spokesman for Grupo Salinas, declined to comment on the billionaire’s net worth.

Table of Contents

Biography

Education: Tulane University, Monterrey Institute of Technology, University of Guadalajara

Great-grandfather Benjamin Salinas Westrup began selling beds with brother-in-law Joel Rocha Barocio in 1906, eventually turning the business into furniture retailer Salinas & Rocha. Grandfather Hugo Salinas Rocha co-founded a radio factory that would later become Grupo Elektra. Father Hugo Salinas Price joined the business in 1950, rising to CEO in 1952.

Young Ricardo sold honey door to door with his brothers and sisters at the age of 10. After graduating from the Monterrey Technological Institute in 1977, he briefly ran a restaurant before turning to business. Among his first endeavors: installing satellite dishes made out of metal and chicken wire.

He succeeded his father as CEO of Grupo Elektra in 1987, and expanded the company into banking. Today, Grupo Elektra operates more than 6,000 outlets in the U.S. and seven countries in Latin America. He founded TV Azteca in 1993, effectively breaking Mexico’s television monopoly. Ten years later, he led a group of investors in buying Iusacell, Mexico’s third-biggest mobile phone operator, and sold a 50 percent stake in the business to AT&T for $1.7 billion in January 2015.

Through his two foundations, Salinas’s charitable giving focuses on improving health and education in Mexico, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.

Career

Ricardo Salinas Pliego is a CPA graduate of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). After earning an MBA at Tulane University, he joined Elektra in 1981 as import manager. He learned the business moves when the company faced dire financial straits at the continuing devaluation of the eighties. Between 1981 and 1986, Salinas experimented with other businesses such as a restaurant in Monterrey, satellite dishes and the sale of systems multi communication.

In 1987 Ricardo succeeded his father Hugo Salinas Price as CEO of Grupo Elektra. The company began as a family-owned furniture manufacturing company called Salinas & Rocha founded in 1906 by Salinas’ great-grandfather, Benjamin Salinas. In 1950, Hugo Salinas Rocha created Grupo Elektra and when Ricardo Salinas became CEO of the company in 1987 he refocused Elektra on basic products: appliances, electronics, and furniture. Significantly, he developed at Elektra a vast new consumer market among Mexico‘s lower middle income consumers by providing credit sales and diverse financial products and services.

Grupo Elektra expanded further and became Mexico’s biggest consumer-finance company when, in 2002, it won the first banking license granted to any Mexican institution in nearly a decade. The strategy was to build new markets by creating new buying power among classes of people largely ignored by most other major Mexican businesses. Thus was born Banco Azteca, which currently has operations in Mexico, Panama, Guatemala and Honduras. Subsequently, Grupo Elektra obtained two financial licenses from the federal government to create Seguros Azteca and Afore Azteca.

Salinas is also chairman of TV Azteca, one of the world’s two largest producers of Spanish-language television programming. Under his leadership, TV Azteca broke Mexico’s long-standing television monopoly through the successful privatization of a media package offered by the government.

In 2001, TV Azteca launched Azteca America, a wholly owned Spanish-language broadcasting network aimed at the 50 million-strong Hispanic population of the United States. Azteca America had affiliates in 70 markets, including Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Miami and Houston, reaching 89 percent of the Hispanic population in the U.S. Azteca America was sold to HC2 Holdings in 2017.

In 2003, Salinas bought Iusacell (the first cell phone company in Mexico) and four years later, merged it with Unefon, another cell phone company, founded by him in 1999. However, in early 2015, Grupo Salinas announced the sale of Iusacell to AT&T Today, with Totalplay, offers the most innovative internet and television services and telephony via fiber optics to home. Also, Totalplay Empresarial provides broadband internet access video surveillance, broadband interfaces, videoconferencing, among other services to institutions and companies throughout Mexico.

In 2012, Grupo Elektra acquired Advance America, —currently Purpose Financial—, a company that provides short-term non- bank loans in the United States. Also put into operation Punto Casa de Bolsa. The Group operates more than six thousand points of contact in Mexico, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru and Panama.

Salinas has participated and addressed The World Economic Forum, The Economist Roundtable on Mexico, the Young Presidents’ Organization, UCLA, the Institute of the Americas, Harvard Business School and TED, where he discussed issues related to globalization, education, entrepreneurship, freedom and opportunity in the BOP. He also has a blog where he publishes his business, political, economic and cultural ideas. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Hill, Newsweek in Spanish, La Opinión, and regularly writes in the Mexican press. Mr. Salinas was the first Mexican to elect the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute.

It was announced in 2020 that Salinas had 10% of his liquid portfolio invested in Bitcoin.

Milestones

1955 Ricardo Benjamin Salinas Pliego is born in Mexico.
1972 Works in the auditing department of Mexican retailer Sanborn’s.
1977 Graduates from college; takes a job at Arthur Andersen.
1981 Begins work as an import manager at Grupo Elektra.
1987 Becomes chairman and CEO of Grupo Elektra.
1993 With investors, acquires TV stations from Mexican government.
1997 Grupo Elektra opens first outlets outside Mexico.
2002 Grupo Elektra gets into banking, opens 800 Banco Azteca offices.

Philanthropy

Salinas formed the nonprofit Fundación Azteca in 1997 to address a broad range of social problems with ongoing campaigns in healthcare and nutrition, education, and the protection of the environment. It is a foundation that finances and supports other foundations. Fundación Azteca has raised millions of dollars, benefiting hundreds of thousands of lives.

In April 2021, the Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego Center was inaugurated, a space that seeks to promote the development of ideas that contribute to the transformation of Mexico, based on six lines of action: Freedom, Rule of Law, Education, Leadership, Art and Culture, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The initiative is made up of the following programs: Arte & Cultura, through which artistic and cultural activities are promoted to raise the quality of life of society; Caminos de la Libertad, a space for reflection on different aspects of freedom that seeks to raise awareness of its value and Kybernus, which promotes the formation of young leaders from the local level.

Companies

Grupo Salinas.

Retail and Financial Services
- Grupo Elektra.
  - Purpose Financial.
  - Punto Casa de Bolsa.
- Banco Azteca.
  - Seguros Azteca.
  - Afore Azteca
- Tiendas Neto.