Tycoons Weekly Update

Latin America’s richest man Mexican telecom titan Carlos Slim Helú dropped one spot to No. 3 losing $25 billion.

Mexican Communication businessman and Investor Carlos Slim Helu are involved in a group of companies. His main business and investment sectors are telecommunications, banking, insurance, retail, technology, and auto parts manufacturing. According to the Forbes business magazine Carlos Slim Helu is famous being the number 3 richest men out of top ten in the world, wealthiest in the Mexican and the richest Latin American man.
Carlos Slim Helú is the 5th of 6 children of Mr. Yusef Salim and mother Linda Helu. He was born in Mexico City on the 28th of January, 1940 and graduated as engineer from the University of “Nacional Autonoma de Mexico”.

During a privatization period of the Mexican government in 1990 Slim Helu acquired the Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) cheaply and he makes it profitable by raising phone call costs soon after purchasing the business. For which he was criticized too. But he is going on improving the phone services in Mexico by offering various services like local and long distance calls, mobile phone services, Internet services, and a telephone directory etc. The main secrete of Carlos financial success is finding undervalued companies and making them profitable.
Carlos Slim Helu say’s “It’s not a question of arriving and putting in a whole new administration, but instead, arriving and “compacting” things as much as possible, reducing management layers. We want as few management layers as possible, so that executives are very close to the operations. We also don’t believe in having big corporate infrastructures.”

Carlos Slim Helu has been some time referred as the “Warren Buffett of Latin America”, but the basic difference between Carlos and Buffett is that Carlos thinks himself as an operator of his companies, but Buffett is just an investor of his companies.

Carlos has keen interest in Internet and modern technology. He say’s “Technology is going to transform people’s lives and society everywhere in the world. My main task is to understand what’s going on and try to see where we can fit in.”
Carlos owns the largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Mexico and one of the largest in the United States of America and also the major computer retailer CompUSA throughout the USA and Puerto Rico having more than 200 retail stores.

According to Forbes business magazine Mexican Telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helu’s was the 4th richest man in the world with net worth of US $23.8 billion, in 2006 with net worth US $30 billion he ranked as the 3rd richest man in the world and in 2007 he remained in third position with US $49 billion. This was a successful year for Mexican Billionaire. This year his wealth dramatically increased by US $19 billion. In June 2007, it was reported that his wealth increased to US $67.8 billion (estimated), which put him ahead of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and ranked him the richest man in the world.
In the year 2009, due to economic recession the collective net worth of richest people’s down $2 trillion from last year. Bill Gates lost $18 billion, Warren Buffett, last year’s No. 1, lost $25 billion and Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helú also lost $25 billion and dropped to third richest men in the world.