Mané Calvo, CEO of the Calvo Group, at ESADE: 'We expect to close 2016 with a turnover of 840 million euros'
‘We expect to close 2016 with a turnover of €840 million, double that of a decade ago’, said Mané Calvo García-Benavides, CEO of the Calvo Group, today at the first session of the 10th ESADE-Deloitte ‘Family Businesses in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities’ lecture series. Calvo confirmed that the canning company will end the year at ‘more than 107,000 tonnes’, a volume it expects to see increase in the coming years. ‘Our main market is Brazil, with almost half our sales, followed by Italy, Spain, Central America and Argentina’, the CEO explained. ‘We are currently exploring two or three new countries, which I am not going to name. We expect them to become our sixth largest market shortly’, he continued, since ‘we have the advantage of knowing how to tailor our products to the consumers of each region’. He credits this same circumstance for the group’s continued growth in profitability, despite the crisis.
Family business and legacy
Calvo recently turned 76. Today it is led by the third generation. Some of its major milestones include the creation of the round tin, three-tin packs, and the introduction of yellowfin tuna in Spain, as well as the acquisitions of the Nostromo Group and Gomes da Costa, in 1993 and 2004, respectively. Today, it is the largest canning company in Spain, the second largest in Europe, and the fifth largest in the world. This is hardly surprising, given its portfolio of more than 700 products in over 70 countries. ‘Our commitment to strong brands, an efficient value chain, and the company’s own values have formed the basis for successful and orderly national and international development’, Calvo explained.
According to Calvo, who has been CEO since 2006 – ‘a difficult period’ – one of the keys to his own success has been the fact that ‘they let me make mistakes, and that gave me confidence’. ‘That is one of the most distinctive traits of a family business’, he added. ‘Although we are no longer all present in the organizational leadership, we have passed on the feeling of belonging, and that is another of our hallmarks’, he noted.
Control of the entire value chain
Throughout his talk at ESADE Madrid, Calvo emphasised his group’s support for the UN Global Compact, noting in particular that its fishing practices are now verified by an ‘independent third party’ twice a year. ‘These practices include a permanent registry of fishing data, scientific observers on 100% of our vessels, the return of non-target species, and a ban on discards and transhipments at sea’, he explained.
Calvo subjects its supply chain to the same control, requiring ‘our tuna suppliers to comply with a strict code of conduct that includes human rights, labour rights, respect for the environment and sustainable supply’. ‘We are also working on an assessment system that will include risk analyses, criticality rankings, and physical and remote audits’, he explained.
Sustainability in people, production and growth
Another key point of the company’s business plan is the ‘recruitment, retention and development of talent’. To this end, the CEO of the Calvo Group, which employs some 5,100 people, highlighted the company’s different plans for training and achievement-based compensation, as well as the employee satisfaction survey it conducts every two years. He also pointed to the company’s annual performance assessments and internal communication policies.
With regard to the future, Calvo explained, ‘We are currently working on the Calvo Excellence System, under which we will be investing more than €25 million in the industrial part alone. We are committed to taking the group in the direction we think the world is headed – flexible and efficient factories. Today, any factory can make a three-pack; we will be able to make a four-, five- or six-pack, and if our client wants a triangle, we’ll be able to do that, too’, he said.
Finally, returning once again to the need to control the supply chain and his group’s commitment to sustainable production, Calvo noted, ‘There will be two types of companies, those that integrate corporate social responsibility throughout their value chain and those that do not.’ ‘We aim to be in the vanguard of the future. We want our growth to remain stable over time, at 6% or 7% a year’, he concluded.
This first session of the 10th ESADE-Deloitte ‘Family Businesses in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities’ lecture series also featured Fernando Ruiz, chairman of Deloitte, Pedro Navarro, executive vice-chairman of the ESADE Foundation Board of Trustees, and Alberto Gimeno, an associate professor in the Department of Strategy and General Management at ESADE Business School.
