By John Paul Rathbone
Gaining altitude: São Paulo in Brazil, a country that accounts for about half of the economy and population of Latin America
If you have flown on a regional airline in Europe or the US recently, it is quite possible you were sitting in an Embraer aircraft – designed and built in Brazil. If you have eaten grilled chicken on the Fourth of July at a barbecue in the US, the poultry could well have been provided by Pilgrim’s Pride, majority-owned by JBS, the Brazilian meat processor.
And if you perhaps drank a Budweiser at that barbecue, nowadays that is a slice of Brazil as well. The iconic American beer brand belongs to Anheuser-Busch InBev, the $37bn Belgian-headquartered company, most of whose top managers call Brazil home.
These are just three of the growing band of Latin multinationals dubbed “multilatinas”. It is no accident they hail from Brazil, which accounts for roughly half of Latin America’s economy and population. But multilatinas are common to Spanish-speaking Latin America as well.
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