Indústrias Reunidas Fábricas Matarazzo
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Indústrias Reunidas Fábricas Matarazzo[1] (IRFM) was a Brazilian business group, the largest in Latin America at its time, headquartered in the city of São Paulo, capital of the homonymous state, where it employed about 6% of the local population. It had the fourth highest gross income in Brazil and had more than thirty thousand employees in its numerous units throughout the country.[2][3]
Industry | Conglomerate |
---|---|
Founded | 1911 |
Founder | Francesco Matarazzo |
Defunct | 1987 |
Fate | Bankrupt |
Headquarters | São Paulo, Brasil |
Key people | Francesco Matarazzo
Hermelino Matarazzo Francisco Matarazzo Júnior |
Number of employees | c. 30,000 at its peak |
Its founder was the Italian immigrant Francesco Matarazzo, who became the richest man in the Brazil at the time.[4][5][6]
Matarazzo, who was a farmer in his homeland and a peddler shortly after arriving in Brazil, started his business life with a small commercial house that sold lard in Sorocaba. In the 1940s, at its peak, the group had more than 350 companies in the fields of food, textiles, beverages, land and sea transport, ports, railways, shipyards, metallurgy, agriculture, energy, banking, real estate and others.[7]
At the end of the 1980s, it filed for bankruptcy, under the command of Maria Pia Matarazzo, granddaughter of the founder, going bankrupt soon after. The only factory left from the old complex, surviving to the 21st century, was the one that produced the soap brand "Francis". It was sold to the Bertin group, which in turn resold it to the JBS group, owner of Flora Higiene e Limpeza.[8] It still owns several properties and land spread across Brazil, it also leases paper, sugar and alcohol mills.