by Amancio Ortega Gaona is recognized for having founded Inditex, a corporation in the textile industry that owns well-known brands, including the clothing chain zarawhich has a presence in nearly a hundred countries.
In its most recent business strategy, the company of the richest man in Spain and one of the twenty in the world announced that will withdraw from some countriesamong them Argentina, to transfer the management of the operations of the eleven Zara stores to a multinational that will continue to offer the products.
Born in León, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, Ortega Gaona has a career in the business world of almost 50 years since he began making gowns with his late first wife, Rosalía Mera, mother of heiress Marta Ortega Pérez. Since then he has founded a fashion empire of 6,000 stores around the world of brands like Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius and Forever 21.
After stepping aside from the Inditex presidency, in recent years Ortega diversified his business matrix towards investing in commercial properties and offices in the main cities of Spain, other European countries and the United States.
From making gowns to founding the Inditex empire
Amancio Ortega Gaona was born in 1936 into a working family in northwestern Spain. When he was thirteen years old, the young man began working in a clothing store in the city of La Coruña, and at thirty he began hand-making bathrobes with his brothers and his future wife, Rosalía Mera.
It was in 1975 that the Ortega Mera were able to open their first local zara and in the mid-eighties it incorporated the chain into a company that it titled inditex, and shortly after that milestone, they divorced. Rosalía, meanwhile, was the second main shareholder of the company that became an empire until she died in August 2013 due to a brain hemorrhage.
Towards the end of the 1980s, Ortega expanded into Portugal, France and the United States, and in the following decade he launched the Pull&Bear and Bershka brands and acquired Massimo Dutti and Stradivarius. His rise to the first ranks of the world’s billionaires was capped in 2001, when the company raised €2.4 billion in a public offering.
Ten years later, the company had 5,000 stores in 77 countries and currently has almost 6,000, despite the fact that the company no longer has him as CEO, a position he ceded to Pablo Islas in 2011. In this way, the man became one of the most successful clothing retailers in the world and a “pioneer of the fast fashion“, or fast fashion, as defined by Forbes.
The businesses of Ortega Gaona, the richest Spaniard in the world
With the majority of the shares of the parent company of Zara, Ortega Gaona accumulated a patrimony of 77,300 million dollarsplacing it in the 13th position of the richest in the world according to the list Delaware Forbes dated March 2023. This was in line with the rebound that the shares had in recent months by 56 percent. Thus, he climbed the ranks and retained his place as the richest man in Spain.
Most of Ortega’s fortune is made up of the 59.3 percent of its shares in Inditex, controlled by companies located in Spain: Pontegadea Investments and Partler. Since the company was sold in 2001, Ortega has received more than $10 million in dividends, according to Bloomberg estimates.
In addition, he devoted himself to real estate business and acquired properties in Europe and North America since the end of 2021 for around 3.2 billion dollars. also invested in the energy sector. It controls five percent of Enagás; bought a minority stake in Telefónica for $440 million in 2018; it has interests in the Portuguese REN and in the Spanish operator Red Electrica, as well as in renewable energy projects of Repsol SA.
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