This year, Isidoro Quiroga, the well-known Chilean businessman and founder and majority shareholder of the Asesorías e Inversiones Benjamín S.A, has successfully reached yet another commercial milestone in his business career: he sold Enphase Energy, a California-based company, for US$819 million with a profit of approximately US$735 million.
Enphase Energy is a company that specializes in the design and manufacture of home energy solutions, either through solar energy, domestic energy storage or monitoring, or through the web. Quiroga had bought Enphase Energy in 2018 for US$20 million and in return took 9,523,809 million bonds, at a value of US$2.10 each. Now, he sold 13,548,476 shares and received US$60.5 per unit.
After buying the company in 2018, he bought another 4 million bonds, paying an average of US$ 16 per each bond. Isidoro Quiroga’s total investment in Enphase Energy was about US$84 million and he sold it almost ten times more, proving his savviness for business. But this victory is far from being his first -or last- one in the market.
In 2017, he reached globally recognized success when he sold Australis Seafoods to the Chinese salmon company Joyvio (parent company of Lenovo). Despite not being the largest sale in the market, it far surpasses the amounts of competitors such as Agrosuper, which bought AquaChile for US$ 850 million. He had bought the company in 2003, changed it from its core and transformed it into an international exporting salmon company.
Nevertheless, what is more remarkable about the beneficial transaction was that in that same year he had led Australis Seafoods throughout a major crisis. 2018 was the year of the Infectious Salmon Anemia virus (ISAv) in Chile, which left many salmon producing enterprises in Chile and Canada on the verge of bankruptcy. With the support of his team, they developed a suitable production model and Quiroga handled the crisis firmly and successfully and, only in 2018, Australis Seafoods led the increases in Chilean market, with a return of +26.43% to $79,650 and completing +56.15% so far that year, a natural consequence of his capacity for fast response.
Unlike other businessmen, Quiroga is not afraid of investing internationally. With the vast amount of money he raised in these transactions, he managed to invest heavily in Chile’s stock market. He became a stock investor in companies such as Telefónica, Entel, Endesa, Banco de Chile, SQM and Pilmaiquén, among others. He is also involved in real estate projects such as Valle Escondido and in mining companies such as Minera Fuego. But his participation in the mining business is not limited to Chile: he is also the owner of the Junior Investment Company, a mining company from Australia.
As for his investments in the region, he has olive oil plantations and a wine production company in neighbouring Argentina.
The Chilean businessman graduated as a Commercial Engineer from the University of Chile in 1974 and it was at that time when he started in the business world as a producer and exporter of oregano in the Valparaiso region. But it would be through the Kiwi, a fruit unknown in Chile until then and that he met on a trip to the United States, that he would achieve one of his greatest commercial successes. The next step was diversification and then came investments in the electricity and mining sectors. Today, the businessman operates through his family office, Inversiones Benjamin.