The Business Year

Given the global trend toward sustainability, green energy, and a circular economy, companies are seeing the immense opportunities in Mexico, which had before remained under the radar and underserved.

Jorge Treviño

Managing Director, ECOCE

We are a non-profit civil organization, and we administer a plan to manage waste from packages. We started with PET, but we are also focused on other materials for other types of packages. We can partner with any company that wants to implement a program to adequately manage their waste. We want to partner with those companies that truly believe in recycling and honestly want to implement a waste management plan. It is not a matter of just receiving a certificate to show to third parties. We also want to educate children to bring up a new generation with climate values. We all have to work together to develop a better future for society. Mexico is currently an attractive place to recycle PET packages. We are doing the same thing with other materials as well, for example with metalized flexible packaging. There is a great deal of work to be done in that area. The companies that work with us have to pay a subscription that costs several million pesos per year, but that money is fully used to support policies for the environment. Today, those 30 companies have invested more than USD750 million in recycling plants in Mexico.

Jonathan Zúñiga

Founder, AV Energie

AV Energie is an AHM subsidiary that has always focused on solutions for the private sector. AHM also has a financing company called Be Capital. By analyzing how we could generate direct economic benefits for our clients, in particular B2B clients, we arrived at the formula in which we could provide our financing and where they would generate savings. Instead of offering them a loan, we developed a tool to finance them while generating savings. This financial offering was not present in Mexico’s distributed generation market. As a result of the high investment costs associated with energy projects, energy companies tend to focus on providing energy to homes or smaller projects. From the start, we have aimed our efforts at providing service to industrial and commercial partners. We do offer residential projects. In our experience, they have mainly been for executives and managers of the companies with which we work. We chose to focus our efforts on the energy sector because we identified a clear opportunity. This market was underserved, namely distributed-energy generation. DG is a small market in Mexico with 470MW capacity and USD 470 million in value last year.

Lisseth Cordero

Co-Founder, Lisseth Cordero

Our main reason for founding Ecolana stemmed from our interest in ensuring that people knew where to recycle. We decided to set up Ecolana in 2016 to provide them with a practical solution. Our business model has changed since then, as we had initially thought we would first build a directory where we could charge collection centers to appear in Ecolana: our own yellow pages. We were unsure how to proceed, so we built up a database of collection centers. In this city, there are just around 500. In addition, there are areas of the city that no longer allow collection centers to be set up, in residential areas. These centers are often well out of the way. I talked to the person in charge of this project and said I was setting up a database—a website for consumers, so they would know where to recycle. They were interested in what we were doing and offered us a partnership. We discovered that not just consumers want to recycle, but brands as well, and someone had to make the connection between them. This is where Ecolana comes in. We currently work with over 10 large companies, mainly consumer brands.

Sergio Hernández

President & CEO, CIAL Dun & Bradstreet

Our fifth vertical is a product that evaluates companies in terms of their compliance with sustainability, defined as environmental, social, and governance (ESG). ESG is becoming increasingly relevant in decision-making by investors and the regulatory authorities, among others. We, together with Dun & Bradstreet, decided to create a product to measure payment compliance. We would be the only company to offer this service in the country. In Mexico, banks hire small consultancies that evaluate the company. We want to make it accessible, scale it, and lower the cost in order to obtain the ESG of any company. In the US, sustainability is more common in all areas. As Mexico has a strong link with the country, both need sustainability knowledge, which is why we decided to launch the product simultaneously. It will be extremely promising and will have a positive impact on the economies where we work. The biggest challenge is to measure ESG, to understand who is responsible, which industry is better than another, and so on. Those are the indicators we are trying to define through the amount of data and algorithms we have. One of our top priorities for 2022 will be launching this ESG product.

Carla Ortiz

Country Manager Mexico, RER Energy

We are pioneers in the solar industrial sector, we focus on it, and we have become the market leaders because we continuously bring innovation specifically in financial products. We are dedicated to distributed generation, and we also offer comprehensive solutions. This not only refers to the solar energy sector, but also to smart grids, microgrids, storage, electric vehicles, and so on. Therefore, our clients are able to use solar energy to digitalize the energy in their production plant and get better data and information to improve sustainability. What sets us apart is the quality we offer. We realized that in both markets, energy is a long-term service. We understand this, and that is why our clients remain with us. Finally, we handle the best financial products, in which we try to accommodate the client as much as possible. We also combine the best available technology with the best financial options. It is almost like a form of credit for solar plants. We mostly work in three main sectors, such as the commercial one, in which we work with companies and multinationals across the country. We also operate in conjunction with various industrial profiles. Finally, we have several agricultural projects.

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