A ranking revealed who are the most important corporate leaders in Uruguay

Merco's ranking of Uruguayan business leaders had a number one that it had not had until 2021. Nicolás Jodal, the CEO of technology and software company Genexus, rose to the top of the list. The next three places were completed by Carlos Alberto Lecueder, the owner of Montevideo Shopping; and Orlando Dovat, from Zonamerica, one of the most important free zones in the country.

The ranking takes into account 14 variables to define the positions that are grouped into seven main values. These are: strategic vision and management capacity; commercial vision; talent; ethical behaviors and CSR; international projection; how innovative the leader is; and how good a communicator he is.

This being the third consecutive year of the ranking in Uruguay, it is possible that the pandemic has contributed to the relevance of the trio that currently tops the list. In fact, only Nicolás Jodal played a key role in managing the health emergency in Uruguay, as Genexus developed the Coronavirus app, which the government uses to register vaccines and certificates, in addition to the system that allocated shifts for vaccine doses.

“In 2021 we were presented with how to help in the vaccination system. It was a goal that was not foreseen and, from one moment to the next, we had to help as much as possible to have a system of the highest quality at a very important time for Uruguay. It was undoubtedly the biggest business challenge we had,” Nicolás Jodal told the newspaper El País.

For Lecueder, on the other hand, the biggest challenge was that “when it seemed that we were going to get out of the crisis we fell back in the second quarter of the year”. In this regard, he commented that “the increase in infections threw the country back down and made us feel like we were in a situation of never leaving. The main challenge was to work with the teams to understand that this was a new stumble on the same path and that we had to keep fighting to get ahead,” said studio director Luis E. Lecueder.

The president of Zonamerica, Dovat, spoke of the challenges of constantly calibrating the entire team according to projects, prioritizing a context of instability, change and affected global supply chains. “Something was clear and it was our north with our team: 100% customer focus and transform with them,” he said.

The rest of the positions are completed, in number four by Rafael Hermida, from Mercado Libre; in the fifth is Verónica Raffo from Ferrere Abogados; in the sixth Teresa Cometto of Unilever; the seventh is by Enrique Baliño, from Xn Partners; the eighth is Christopher Jones, from Ta-Ta supermarkets; the new is Nicolás Herrera, from Guyer&Regules; and Ariel Burschtin, in tenth place, from Pedidosya.

Compared to the previous year, a change in the ranking is that now two women make up the top 10 people. In 2021, Verónica Raffo was ranked number seven and the second woman was Patricia Marques, from PwC, who appeared only at number sixteen.

This edition, Cometto climbed from nineteenth to sixth position and Soledad Delfante (leader of human resources at Mercado Libre) from twentieth to twelfth. Among the 100 selected there are 19 women. In 2020, the women were 18.

Another significant change was that Sergio Fogel, one of the founders of the payment processing company, dLocal (which became the first Uruguayan unicorn) entered the list. It reached the twenty-second spot in a context where it recently entered the Forbes list of world billionaires. Of that company, the young president of dLocal is also listed in the 52nd position, Jacobo Singer.

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