Expansion: How was the whole process that the company had to go through to get to this point?
Roberto Aramburo: The decision, in principle, was: grow the company or sell it to the biggest competitor, but I am the third director in this company, I was born here (the founders of the company are an uncle and Arámburo’s father) And so I said: we have no choice but to make it big. That’s when we started preparing the company for a private equity round. When we were in this process is when BIVA begins operations, we had the rapprochement with them and they convinced us more. We stopped all the private capital and since we already had half the road covered, the process with BIVA and with the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV) was really very agile.
There is a lack of culture in the Mexican business community, which sees the preparation of a company for an IPO as an expense and we see it as an investment. Institutionalization pays for itself, because your monitoring, your processes, your metrics, in the long term, make you a safer company at an operational level, you anticipate more any incident and your profitability tends to be better over time, due to the same competitiveness that you have in the results.
Expansion: When do they go public and why did they decide to do it on these dates?
Roberto Aramburo: We plan the broadcast between the end of this month and the beginning of April. What we see right now as momentum is that there is no placement, so we have the attention to ourselves. From the economic point of view, by having a national and international presence, we have always been very protected from risks and we see that Mexico has always been strong with entrepreneurs and free enterprise that have come out ahead despite any crisis. In addition, the inflationary moments that are being experienced are good for this line of business.
Expansión: During the roadshows, how much interest did you see from investors?
Roberto Aramburo: We have seen a lot of interest from retail investors and also from certain medium-sized groups, the problem is when you arrive with institutional investors who are very large, because of the time it takes.
Small and medium-sized companies are the engine of Mexico, the ones that move this country, and I would tell investors to trust in new companies, to look for new investment alternatives in companies like Globcash and to give us the opportunity to get to know each other.
Expansion: Once the issue is made, where will the resources they obtain go?
Roberto Aramburo: We plan to open 300 new pawnshops (an increase of 155% from the 194 currently operating) and have money in the box for inorganic growth in the US market.