José Antonio Fernández Carbajal
José Antonio Fernández Carbajal is a Mexican businessman who is executive chairman of FEMSA, Fomento Económico Mexicano, one of the largest companies in Latin America. He served as its chief executive from 1995 and has chaired it since 2001, and is also chairman of Coca-Cola FEMSA, the largest bottler of Coca-Cola products in the world by volume.
FEMSA's principal businesses are OXXO, the largest convenience store chain in Latin America with more than twenty thousand outlets, Coca-Cola FEMSA, and a group of retail and digital financial services operations. Fernández Carbajal is also chairman of the board of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, among the most highly regarded private universities in Latin America.
Early life and education
Fernández Carbajal was born in 1954 in Monterrey, Mexico, the industrial city in the north-east of the country that has produced a disproportionate share of Mexico's large corporations and much of its business establishment.
He studied industrial engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, generally known as the Tecnológico de Monterrey or Tec, and subsequently took a master's degree in business administration at the same institution.
Career
FEMSA
Fernández Carbajal joined FEMSA in 1988. The group traces its origins to the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc, a brewery founded in Monterrey in 1890, and had by the late twentieth century become a diversified holding company comprising brewing, soft drink bottling, packaging and retail operations.
He became chief executive in 1995 and chairman in 2001, and directed the transformation of the group over the following two decades.
OXXO
The most consequential of those decisions concerned OXXO. The convenience store chain had been established in 1978, initially as an outlet for the group's beer, and under Fernández Carbajal it was developed into the centre of the company's retail strategy and expanded at a pace of hundreds and then more than a thousand new stores a year.
The reasoning was that Mexico's retail landscape consisted of very large numbers of small independent shops and a growing formal sector, that urban Mexicans made frequent small purchases rather than weekly stocking trips, and that a dense network of small standardised stores would capture that behaviour. The chain grew to become the largest of its kind in Latin America and among the largest anywhere by store count.
OXXO subsequently became considerably more than a retailer. Because a very substantial proportion of Mexicans lacked bank accounts but lived close to an OXXO, the stores became a channel for bill payment, for remittance collection, for cash deposits into accounts held elsewhere, and for prepaid financial products. Spin by OXXO, a digital wallet launched in 2021, and the associated Spin Premia loyalty programme, extended this into a financial services business built on the physical network, reaching tens of millions of users.
Coca-Cola FEMSA
Coca-Cola FEMSA, listed separately, expanded through acquisition across Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Guatemala and other Latin American markets to become the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world by volume. The Coca-Cola Company holds a substantial minority interest.
The beer business
In 2010 FEMSA sold its brewing operations, including the Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma brands Dos Equis, Sol and Tecate, to Heineken in exchange for approximately a twenty per cent interest in the Dutch company rather than for cash.
The transaction was strategically significant in two respects. It exited a business in which global consolidation had made independent regional brewers uncompetitive, and it converted the proceeds into a holding in a global company that continued to appreciate. FEMSA held the Heineken stake for more than a decade before disposing of it.
FEMSA Forward
In February 2023 the company announced a strategic review, presented as FEMSA Forward, which concluded that the group had become too diversified and should concentrate on the businesses where it holds a leading position and a genuine advantage.
The result was a substantial programme of divestment. The Heineken holding was sold during 2023, realising several billion euros. The logistics business Solistica and the packaging business Envases Universales were sold. The health division, comprising pharmacy chains in several countries, and the fuel retailing business were placed under review.
The proceeds were directed to the retail businesses, to Coca-Cola FEMSA and to shareholder returns. The review was widely regarded as a well-executed simplification of a conglomerate that had accumulated businesses over decades without a consistent rationale.
Tecnológico de Monterrey
Fernández Carbajal has chaired the board of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, the private university system founded in 1943 by a group of Monterrey businessmen including FEMSA's own founders.
The institution operates campuses across Mexico and is among the most highly regarded universities in Latin America, particularly in engineering and business. Under his chairmanship it undertook a substantial revision of its educational model, known as Tec21, moving from conventional lecture-based instruction towards project-based and challenge-based learning, a change implemented across the system.
He has been involved in the reconstruction and development of the areas around the Monterrey campus following a security incident in 2010 in which two students were killed during a confrontation between the army and organised crime, an episode that prompted a broader programme of urban regeneration in the surrounding district.
Context: Mexican business
FEMSA belongs to the group of large Mexican corporations that emerged from Monterrey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that have dominated Mexican industry since, alongside the businesses of the Slim family and a small number of others.
The structure of Mexican business has particular characteristics. Ownership is concentrated, frequently in families, and controlled through holding companies with multiple classes of shares. Several large markets are highly concentrated, which has been the subject of competition policy attention and of criticism from international bodies. And the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, and its successor agreement of 2020, reoriented the Mexican economy towards integration with the United States, which benefited manufacturers and exporters considerably and exposed domestically focused businesses to foreign competition.
FEMSA's trajectory reflects these conditions. The sale of the brewing business to Heineken was a recognition that a regional brewer could not remain independent once global consolidation began. The growth of OXXO was a bet on the domestic Mexican consumer at a time when the formal retail sector was small, and it proved correct on a scale few anticipated.
Assessment
Fernández Carbajal's record contains two decisions of real consequence.
The first was OXXO. Building a network of more than twenty thousand small stores, in a market where the incumbent retail structure was informal and fragmented, required sustained investment over decades before the network effects became apparent, and the subsequent extension into financial services, using a physical presence that no bank could match in a country where bank branches are scarce outside cities, was a genuinely original use of the asset.
The second was the beer transaction. Selling a business the group had operated since 1890, and taking payment in the acquirer's shares rather than in cash, required both a clear view of where the brewing industry was going and a willingness to give up the company's founding activity. The holding subsequently appreciated substantially and its eventual disposal funded the reorientation announced in 2023.
The criticism that attaches to FEMSA is one of conglomerate structure generally, that a group spanning bottling, convenience retail, pharmacy, fuel, logistics and packaging is harder to value and harder to manage than its parts, and the 2023 review substantially accepted that argument. That the company reached that conclusion itself, rather than under pressure from an activist investor, is to its credit.