Indústrias Reunidas Fábricas Matarazzo (IRFM) was a Brazilian business group,ústriasReunidasFá the largest in Latin America at its time, headquartered in the city of São Paulo, capital of the homonymous state, where it employed about 6% of the local population. It had the fourth highest gross income in Brazil and had more than thirty thousand employees in its numerous units throughout the country.
Its founder was the Italian immigrant Francesco Matarazzo, who became the richest man in the Brazil at the time.
Matarazzo, who was a farmer in his homeland and a peddler shortly after arriving in Brazil, started his business life with a small commercial house that sold lard in Sorocaba. In the 1940s, at its peak, the group had more than 350 companies in the fields of food, textiles, beverages, land and sea transport, ports, railways, shipyards, metallurgy, agriculture, energy, banking, real estate and others.
At the end of the 1980s, it filed for bankruptcy, under the command of Maria Pia Matarazzo, granddaughter of the founder, going bankrupt soon after. The only factory left from the old complex, surviving to the 21st century, was the one that produced the soap brand "Francis". It was sold to the Bertin group, which in turn resold it to the JBS group, owner of Flora Higiene e Limpeza. It still owns several properties and land spread across Brazil, it also leases paper, sugar and alcohol mills.
History
Foundation
Francesco Matarazzo arrived in Brazil in 1881, fleeing a serious economic crisis in Italy. He brought with him a ton of lard, his only capital to start a business. However, in an accident, all his stock ended up at the bottom of the sea. Then he gathered resources and in 1883 he established the Casa Matarazzo in Sorocaba, a warehouse that sold basic goods, which can be considered his first business. There he extracted lard for sale. He then began to travel through cities on the back of a mule, buying pigs and selling lard, an essential culinary item at the time.
In 1890 he moved to the São Paulo and, in the following year, with his brothers Giuseppe and Luigi, Francesco created the company Matarazzo S.A., which had 41 minority shareholders, mainly Italians. The company's main activity was the import of wheat flour and cotton from the United States.
With the Spanish-American War in 1898, which involved some colonies in Central America, the import of flour was compromised. Matarazzo then began to buy the product from Argentina. Then he decided to produce the flour in Brazil. With the help of credit from the British bank The London and Brazilian Bank (later Bank of London and South America), he built a modern mill in São Paulo in 1900.
Moinho Matarazzo, as it came to be called, was the largest industrial facility in the city of São Paulo, which processed 2,500 bags of flour a day, each weighing 44 kilograms.
Soon after, Francesco decided to also manufacture the packaging cans, opening a metallurgical plant. Remaining faithful to the practice of investing in different branches of the production chain, he created a cotton weaving company, starting from the sack section of his mill.
In 1911, the industrial facilities that served the varied activities of Matarazzo came together in a formal organization, thus creating the Indústrias Reunidas Fábricas Matarazzo, a joint-stock company. The company's motto was Fides, Honor, Labor.
Rise
The set of industries quickly achieved great success. Under the motto of “a good deal is made in the purchase, not in the sale”, Francesco Matarazzo was increasingly expanding the company's set of manufacturing units and its range of products.
In 1920, the Água Branca industrial complex was inaugurated, in the west zone of São Paulo, in an area of 100,000 square meters. The place was characterized by its immense brick chimneys, which could be seen from hundreds of meters away. This was the first industrial park in São Paulo with a verticalized notion of production.
Factories of various branches were installed there, such as sawmills, refineries, distillers, slaughterhouses, carts, soaps, perfumes, fertilizers and insecticides, candles, nails and liquors. It also had workers' villages, warehouses, bank and a pioneer film distributor. Everything was supplied with energy from the company's own power plant, at Casa do Eletricista and Casa das Caldeiras, the only remaining buildings of the entire industrial complex to this day.