Roberto Moreno, the president of Amarilo, found a great partner to enter the Shopping Center business in which they had no expertise. It is about of the powerful Pantaleón Group, a leader in the Central American sugar sector, which has had the company Spectrum since 1995, to deal with the development of real estate projects. They set up, for ten years, a company under the name Cimento and they have already built and operate two shopping centers in the country under the single owner model, where they own the entire center and rent the mixed-use spaces.
In 2015 it opened its doors Fontanar Shopping Center in Chíatheir success led them to open four years later Arkadia in Medellin. The company has two main businesses, the residential one in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and the commercial branch that has to do with the development of shopping centers and mixed-use projects such as warehouse areas with offices or a hotel, in this branch they are in Colombia, as well as Guatemala and Honduras.
The Pantaleón group is one of the largest Central American economic conglomerates
The Pantaleón Group, a family conglomerate that started in the mid-19th century on the South Coast of Guatemala under the vision of Manuel María Herrera, an industrial farmer and minister of development of that country, who would convert a farm that he bought from Escuintla, named Pantaleón and San Gregorio, in a successful mill, and which would lead him to establish, together with his two eldest sons, Francisco and Carlos, the company Herrera & Compañía.
Upon the death of his father in 1883, Carlos Herrera y Luna took charge of the company and began the expansion of the mill, turning it into the largest sugar producer in Guatemala, with its own railway station to the Port of San José, in the Pacific Ocean, and which allowed him to buy the El Baúl Sugar Mill in the early 1900s, also in Guatemala.
Interim President of Guatemala Between March 1918 and March 1919, he was a visionary and perseverant, who accumulated investments in land, crops, machinery and real estate, being the origin of an entire dynasty. He died in Paris, France in 1933, his son Carlos Herrera Dorión had taken the lead a few years earlier promoting the export of sugar to international markets.
Parisian by birth, Julio Herrera Zeballos, son of Carlos Herrera Dorión, returned to Guatemala after studying in the US and working for a few years managing a coffee farm. At 39 years old, in 1973, he assumed the reins of the renowned Pantaleón Group that expanded throughout Central America through Pantaleón Sugar Holdings – PSH, with the purchase of another sugar mill in Guatemala, Concepción in 1984, and Monte Rosa in Nicaragua in 1998.
The Herreras also have other Colombian partners
Given the fall in international sugar prices, the Group is committed to diversification from sugar, develops the cogeneration of electrical energy based on sugarcane bagasse, and builds a distillery to produce ethanol and other related products from molasses. Eight years later, in 1980, the Pantaleón mill had become the largest producer in Central America.
In an alliance of halves with Colombina owned by the Caicedo family, in turn owners of Riopaila, more than twenty years ago, in 2001, they established the Compañía deAlimentas del Pacifico – Capsa food plant, in Guatemala, to serve the regions of Central America and the Caribbean with sweets. and cookies, which in 2016 was acquired in its entirety by the Valle del Cauca group, becoming one of the seven production plants it has: five in Colombia and one in Spain to supply the demand in Europe and Africa.
As a result of the pandemic, this investment suffered a hard blow and the President of the company Cesar Caicedo raised the need to rethink the business and although at some point he considered the possibility of closing the plant, he chose the path of restructuring better.
For your part Julio Herrera continued his expansion in the sugar businesseither. A mill acquisition plan was drawn up. In Honduras it bought the La Grecia mill in 2008 and three years later in Mexico, the Panuco mill in Veracruz.
The Manuelita Group of Cali invited them in 2016 to buy half of the Vale Do Paraná sugar mill near São Paulo, Brazil, owned by Unicalco, for which they created the investment company called Colgua Investments, from Panama, later in June 2022, both groups They sold it to Companhia Melhoramentos do Norte do Paraná, dedicated to the production of ethanol and electrical energy for around USD 186 billion.
Julio Herrera, with a career of more than 50 years in the development of the sugar agroindustry, is currently the president emeritus of the Pantaleón Group, which participates in 25% of the total sugar exports in Guatemala, making it one of the 10 most important in Latin America, has expanded the Group’s activities to real estate businesses, shopping centers, forestry and financial investments, among others. In March of this year he was awarded the Global Lifetime Achievement Award in the Sugar Industry, at the Dubai Sugar Conference 2024.
The current CEO of the Group is his son Diego Herrera, fifth generation family, who assumed the position in 2010 after studying in the EEA. USA and London, and after dedicating a few years to the financial sector in New York and launching a real estate business in Mexico. The Pantaleón Group has managed all these years to diversify risks with its expansion to new countries and the diversification of its products, a strategy that includes two shopping centers in Colombia.
Spectrum, the real estate division of Grupo Pantaleón, has become the most dynamic branch of the group in recent years. At the end of 2015, the Naranjo Mall shopping center opened in Guatemala, a country where it has three others, Miraflores, Naranja Mall and Portales. The two shopping centers in partnership with Amarilo are super successful, especially the Fontanar Chía, which has a strategic location with respect to the development of Bogotá to the north. For its part, Arkadia in Medellín has managed to be a reference in the west of the city, in the neighbors of Belén, La Mota, El Rodeo and Laureles.
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