Multinationals

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More than 120 multinational companies call Coral Gables home, with offices that range from global headquarters to U.S. hubs and regional service providers. The multinationals located here represent a broad range of industries, from hospitality, aviation, communications and engineering to architecture, executive recruitment, produce distribution and entertainment. Among dozens of multinationals in the city are AMC Networks, Bunge, Cargill, Crystal Lagoons, Diageo, Fyffes, Hermès of Paris, IBM, Lexmark, Mondelez, Perkins + Will, Richemont, Swarovski, and Willis Towers Watson.

Among the multinationals with the largest presence are infrastructure builder MasTec, operating a global headquarters with some 300 employees in the city; spirits maker Bacardi, with its North American headquarters and more than 300 employees here; and Fresh Del Monte Produce, with its headquarters for the Americas here and more than 275 employees. These three giants, along with the Euro/Latin headquarters for global jewelry brand Tiffany & Co., are profiled here. Details on another 25 top firms follow.

Bacardi Limited

Fresh Del Monte Produce

Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, produces and markets more than 200 brands and labels, including Bacardí rum, Grey Goose vodka, Patrón tequila, Dewar’s scotch whisky, Bombay Sapphire gin, and Martini vermouth. Founded more than 158 years ago in Santiago de Cuba, family-owned Bacardi Limited currently employs more than 7,000 worldwide, operates production facilities in 11 countries, and sells its brands in more than 170 countries. Estimated annual sales: $5 billion.

While the global headquarters are located in Bermuda, its North American headquarters are located on Le Jeune Road in Coral Gables, where nearly 300 people are employed, mostly for sales and marketing in the United States and Canada. The Gables headquarters is run by regional president Pete J. Carr, a 25-year veteran in the beverage industry. From here, Carr runs a rum distillery in Puerto Rico and a bottling plant in Jacksonville, along with another 300 employees across North America.

The Bacardi headquarters here is also home to the family (and hence corporate) archives, where more than 30,000 items are catalogued and stored, including a wall-sized painting of the Cuban countryside by famed artist Antonio Gattorno, first commissioned for their Empire State Building office in 1938.

Fresh Del Monte Produce employs some 275 people on Sevilla Avenue in a farm-to-table business that mainly grows, transports and sells fresh fruits and vegetables. Coral Gables hosts the U.S. executive office for the brand, whose holding company now ranks among the world’s biggest distributors of bananas, pineapples and other fresh produce. Just in North America, the company distributes about 100 million individual bananas every week.

Spun off from Del Monte’s canned food unit in the 1980s, the produce venture has been transforming since the 1990s under the leadership of Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, who took the holding company Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997. Running day to day operations from Florida is Youssef Zakharia, president and chief operating officer since 2016.

The pandemic has taken a toll, but not too deeply. Fresh Del Monte Produce had sales of $2.2 billion for the first half of 2020, compared to $2.35 billion for the same period last year.

MASTEC TIFFANY & CO.

Located in Coral Gables since 2004, MasTec started out as a construction company mainly for landline phone companies. Since then it has expanded into projects for electric companies, wireless telecom, renewable energy, and oil and gas customers. In the last decade it has grown from $1 billion in annual revenues to more than $7 billion last year. Today, about 60 percent of its income derives from energy – including building transmission lines, wind turbines, solar farms and oil pipelines.

This year, due largely to the impact of the pandemic, sales are down – falling in the first six months from about $3.4 billion last year to just under $3 billion this year. But the bottom line has still remained in the black, albeit less so than last year – $93 million in net income for the first six months compared to $165 million for the comparable period last year.

Leading the company is CEO José R. Mas, son of the hard-scrabble immigrant father who founded the company. In the last decade, Mas has pushed the company into new technologies, landing the company on the prestigious Fortune 500 list of the nation’s largest businesses. The humble leader is now keen on building for 5G wireless systems, battery storage for solar and wind energy, and the deployment of sensors vital for driverless cars and other super-fast, mobile applications.

Luxury brand Tiffany & Co. is known for dazzling diamonds, well-designed silver, a classic movie that bears its name and signature boxes in robin’s egg blue. Less well known is that Coral Gables hosts its headquarters for Latin America, part of a push by the jewelry maker to expand sales beyond its U.S. base.

Tiffany’s Latin America division employs some 15 people in Coral Gables and some 170 more regionwide. It oversees 41 stores, mainly in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and on cruise ships. In fiscal 2019, however, Latin America represented less than five percent of sales at Tiffany’s company-operated stores worldwide, compared to 40 percent in the United States, its latest annual report shows.

Jonathan Bruckner, who took the helm at the Coral Gables hub in 2018 after 25 years working with Tiffany domestically, aims to change that. As the regional VP, Bruckner is keen on growth in Latin America, partly because Tiffany’s rivals have only small footprints in the region so far. The question now is whether a $16.2 billion offer by Louis Vuitton owner LVMH to buy Tiffany, announced last year, will go through as planned this year – and what that means for company resources.

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