Alumni Profiles

Running a business in Venezuela these days can’t be easy.

“Infrastructures are inefficient or non-existent, the bolivar is overvalued, interest rates are at 70 percent, oil prices are lower than they have been in 20 years and the political outlook is extremely uncertain,” says Victoria Formiconi, president of the Formiconi Group, a $50 million family-owned enterprise made up of seven companies including Formiconi, C.A. (construction) and Acero Fabricantes, C.A. (process equipment manufacturing). Both are based in Caracas and service primarily the oil industry. “Any type of long-range planning is impossible.”

Yet despite an overwhelmingly difficult business environment, the Formiconi Group is thriving. This year it received an ISO 9000 certification award given out to a select number of companies on the basis of superior quality control and management. In addition, the group has been establishing strategic alliances with foreign companies that have sophisticated technologies in such related areas as process equipment design and heavy lifting.

The Formiconi Group was founded 40 years ago by Victoria’s Italian-born father, Aldo, who is still involved in the business, dividing his time between homes in Rome, Caracas and Boston. Victoria was born in Caracas but grew up in Italy and graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in economics before attending Wharton.

After almost two years with Manufacturers and Traders Trust Co. in Buffalo, N.Y., she left for Caracas, planning to spend no more than two years at the family company before returning to the U.S. It didn’t work out that way. When the Formiconi Group’s president left in 1989, her father insisted that she take over the job. “I was concerned because so many people had been working in the company for so many years and they might have rejected my appointment,” she says. “But I have been very much accepted and we have been highly successful as an organization. In the last 10 years the Group’s capacity quadrupled and today it has close to 1,000 permanent employees and between 2,000 and 3,000 full-time workers contracted on a project basis.”

Formiconi is married to a Greek-Romanian industrial engineer who was general manager of the company when she first joined in 1987. Today Anton Apostolatos is executive vice president of the Formiconi Group. The couple has four children, ages 6, 4, 2 and four months.

Despite what must be a lack of women executives in her particular industry, Formiconi is very positive about employment opportunities for women in Venezuela. “Yes, Venezuela has a Latin macho-oriented culture, but women are well respected by men and are, in fact, preferred over men in certain professions,” says Formiconi, who has two brothers, neither of them currently active in the company.

“For example, a great majority of judges here are women, a large number of financial executives are women, and women are hired in highly skilled and technical areas like quality control. And to do all this, women don’t have to be aggressive or act in a manly manner. They can be themselves because there is no discrimination and they share the same opportunities that men have. I don’t think this is necessarily true in more developed countries.”

While the company has always been run conservatively — carrying no debt load, reinvesting its profits and operating with a very hands-on type of management — one of Formiconi’s major responsibilities is to constantly reevaluate current strategy.

“Our goal has always been to be the first in quality, first in compliance with the client’s requirements and first in fulfillment of the delivery schedule. We have achieved it, but it is very hard and costly to maintain this standard in a developing country such as Venezuela where so much is unpredictable,” she says.

With the recent opening of the Venezuelan oil industry to the global markets, a very large number of new players, both customers and competitors, are dramatically changing the rules of the game, Formiconi adds. “Some competitors are quoting prices that have no relationship to cost, just to get into the market … We have to find new ways to adapt to this environment and still be successful.”