German Larrea is the chairman of Grupo Mexico, a publicly traded conglomerate. The company's mining division has operations in the US, Mexico, Peru and Spain, and reported revenue of $10.9 billion in 2020. The billionaire also controls closely held Grupo Cinemex, a Mexican chain of movie theaters.
German Larrea's net worth of $25.7B can buy ...
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The majority of German Larrea's fortune is derived from his family's 60% stake in publicly traded Grupo Mexico, a mining conglomerate founded by his father, Jorge.
The billionaire serves as company chairman and owns a 19% stake directly, according to its 2020 annual report. His family's holding company Empresarios Industriales de Mexico owns another 40.5%, according to the annual report. The valuation was updated on Dec. 7, 2021 to include the family-held stake and associated proceeds, and this led to an increase in the calculation of about $18 billion.
He also holds a less than 1% direct stake at Southern Copper Corp., according to a March 2021, regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Larrea spent $315 million in 2008 to acquire Grupo Cinemex, which controlled 42% of Mexico's movie theater market in 2015. Company revenue is calculated to be about 1.3 billion pesos ($70 million) in 2020, based on an analysis of national ticket sales and market share data compiled by Canacine, a Mexican industry association. It's valued using the average enterprise value-to-sales of three publicly traded cinema companies: Cinemark, AMC Entertainment, and Cineplex.
The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Diana Luna, a spokesperson for Grupo Mexico, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the net wealth calculation.
German Larrea is the only surviving son of Jorge Larrea, who was known as Mexico's copper king until his death in 1999. The patriarch's Grupo Mexico empire began with a construction business that he founded in 1942. He expanded into mining in the decades that followed, buying copper-mining assets from the Mexican government during a privatization sale that began in the late 1980s. He first listed his holding company on the Mexico City exchange in 1978.
German Larrea took the reins of a newly reorganized Grupo Mexico in 1994. The company's shares have increased 25-fold under his watch. His $2.2 billion acquisition of Tucson, Arizona-based Asarco in 1999 gave him a stake in Southern Copper, which is now Grupo Mexico's largest asset. In recent years, the press-shy Larrea family has been embroiled in a series of legal battles with minority shareholders, other companies and striking labor unions.