About Apertura

Apertura

Apertura is a monthly business and management magazine published in Buenos Aires alongside El Cronista, Argentina's daily business newspaper, and forming part of the El Cronista publishing group. Written in Spanish for executives, entrepreneurs and managers, Apertura covers Argentine companies, business leaders, management, corporate image and employment, and it is best known nationally for its exclusive rankings, above all Las 100 Mejores en Imagen, the ranking of the 100 companies with the best corporate image in Argentina, published since 2003, and its annual ranking of the best employers. The magazine is published in both print and digital formats, and subscribers to El Cronista's Member service receive digital access to Apertura together with the newspaper. Within Argentine business media, Apertura occupies the magazine counterpart to El Cronista's daily news: slower, more analytical and centred on companies and the people who lead them.

A Magazine Within the El Cronista House

Apertura cannot be understood apart from El Cronista. El Cronista was founded by Martín Giménez Antonio and first published as El Cronista Comercial on 1 November 1908, making it Argentina's first business daily newspaper. It changed its name to El Cronista in 1989, was the first newspaper in Argentina to publish online, in 1994, and was acquired by Grupo América in 2021 for six million dollars, according to published accounts of the sale. Its staff is multidisciplinary and specialises in economics, finance and business. Apertura is described in reference accounts of the newspaper as its monthly business magazine, providing coverage of business in print and digital formats. That relationship defines the magazine's editorial resources and its audience. Apertura draws on the business newsroom culture of a century-old economic daily, while offering the longer interviews, profiles, special editions and rankings that a daily newspaper format cannot easily contain. Readers meet the same Argentine corporate world in both publications, at two different rhythms.

Content: Companies, Executives and Management

Apertura's subject is the Argentine company and its leadership. Its pages cover business strategy, entrepreneurs and executives, management questions, human resources and the performance and reputation of firms across every sector of the economy, including agribusiness, mass consumption, financial services, laboratories and chemicals, durable goods and inputs, automobiles, high technology, communications, public services and infrastructure, retail, prepaid medicine, airlines and insurance, the sectors enumerated in its best-known ranking study. A representative product is CEO Profile, a special profiling chief executives and the companies they lead, of the kind whose media data recorded a print circulation of 7,475 and an audience of 44,850 for a 2020 Apertura cover edition, figures that illustrate the magazine's specialised, executive-level readership rather than a mass circulation. Apertura's interviews with business leaders, such as its interview with Arcor president Luis Pagani accompanying its image ranking, are a staple of the title, giving presidents and chief executives a platform to explain results, strategy and outlook at greater length than daily coverage allows.

Las 100 Mejores en Imagen: The Signature Ranking

The ranking that made Apertura a required reference in Argentine boardrooms is Las 100 Mejores en Imagen, the 100 best companies in corporate image. The first edition dates from 2003, and the ranking is produced with SEL Consultores from the opinions of business leaders, including leading businesspeople, executives, consultants and journalists. The 16th edition, for example, was prepared from more than 260 opinion leaders, and the 20th edition appeared in 2022. For seventeen years the food group Arcor held first place, until Mercado Libre took the top position in 2020 by a minimal difference, retaining it in the following editions. The 2022 edition reported Mercado Libre first in all three sub-rankings, of businesspeople, consultants and journalists, with Arcor second and Toyota third in key sub-rankings, and noted that Mercado Libre had first reached the top ten in 2017, risen from tenth to fifth in 2018 and taken third place the year before its victory. Apertura also publishes sub-rankings by attribute, covering economic and financial solvency, quality of management, responsiveness to consumer needs, care of human resources, innovation, and advertising and communication. Companies cite their positions in the ranking in their own institutional communications, evidence of its standing.

The Best Employers Ranking

Apertura's second major annual study is its ranking of the best employers in Argentina, which classifies leading companies according to their capacity to attract, develop and retain human capital. Companies across sectors announce their positions in it, in categories by company size, such as firms of between 200 and 1,000 employees. In 2023, for example, the law firm Marval recorded its 22nd place in that category, noting that it was the only law firm in the ranking, a fact the firm presented as consolidating its standing in the legal services market. The employers ranking extends Apertura's franchise beyond reputation in the abstract to the workplace itself, and it aligns the magazine with the human-resources agenda of its executive readership: talent, retention and employer branding. Together, the image ranking and the employers ranking give Apertura two annual moments when its judgement is quoted throughout Argentine business, in sectors from agribusiness, where Grupo Los Grobo led its sector category for eleven consecutive years in the image ranking, to professional services and industry.

Publisher, Ownership and the Grupo América Era

Apertura is published in Buenos Aires by the El Cronista group. Reference accounts list El Cronista as published by Unidad Editorial, and in 2021 the newspaper, with its magazine, passed to Grupo América in an acquisition reported at six million dollars. The magazine's history is therefore the history of Argentine business publishing's ownership changes, from a newspaper founded in 1908 as El Cronista Comercial, through Spanish ownership links in the Recoletos and Pearson era noted in international press references, to Argentine ownership under Grupo América. Through those changes Apertura preserved its franchise. Its digital editions are distributed through El Cronista's electronic platform, including PDF editions of numbered issues, such as edition 358, referenced by companies citing the magazine. That continuity of product, a monthly magazine with numbered print editions, digital replicas and rankings, through changes of proprietor, mirrors the resilience of its parent newspaper, which passed 118 years of history in the mid-2020s while continuing to lead Argentine economic, financial and business coverage.

Audience: Decision-Makers Rather Than Mass Readers

Apertura is written for those who make decisions in investment, knowledge and public and private management, the same influential readership its parent newspaper describes for itself. El Cronista's website, cronista.com, was reported by Comscore to have had 20 million unique visitors per month in 2022, making it the most-read Spanish-language economic news outlet in the world, and Apertura shares that digital ecosystem. The magazine's own measured print audience, in the tens of thousands for individual editions, is small beside mass magazines, but it is concentrated among presidents, directors, managers, consultants and specialised journalists, exactly the population surveyed for its rankings and exactly the population advertisers of business services wish to reach. Apertura's influence model is thus one of depth within an elite. When Apertura ranks a company's image or its quality as an employer, the readers judging and being judged substantially overlap, which is precisely what gives the results their weight inside Argentine business.

Digital Presence and the Member Subscription

Apertura is published in both print and digital formats. In January 2022 El Cronista launched its subscription service, Member, allowing readers to access its journalistic content through a monthly subscription, with benefits including exclusive newsletters, historical analyses of currencies and stocks, and digital access to the newspaper and to Apertura. The inclusion of the magazine in the subscription bundle shows its position in the group's digital strategy: Apertura is premium content for paying business readers, not a free-standing website competing for general traffic. El Cronista also publishes newsletters and economics podcasts, and its multimedia operation places the magazine inside a wider digital house. For the profile of Apertura, the practical point is that its current life is dual. The numbered print magazine continues, companies continue to cite its print rankings and editions, and at the same time its content reaches subscribers digitally as part of the El Cronista membership, extending each monthly edition far beyond its print run.

Buenos Aires and the Argentine Corporate Landscape

Apertura is headquartered with El Cronista in Buenos Aires, the city where Argentina's largest companies, banks, consultancies and business media are concentrated. Its rankings nonetheless describe a national corporate landscape. The image ranking's sector leaders come from across the country's economy, including Córdoba agribusiness and food manufacturing, automotive plants, energy companies and national retail and technology firms, and its pages follow Argentine companies operating regionally and globally. The magazine's long view captures structural change. Arcor's seventeen-year reign at the top of the image ranking embodied the prestige of traditional Argentine industry; Mercado Libre's displacement of Arcor from 2020, a company founded by Marcos Galperín in 1999 that reached a market capitalisation above 100,000 million dollars in 2020, embodied the rise of the knowledge economy, which remained at the margin of crisis while older sectors struggled, in Apertura's own analysis of the result. A magazine whose rankings register such a changing of the guard, year by year and attribute by attribute, becomes a source for the history of Argentine capitalism itself.

Apertura and Mercado: Two Business Magazine Traditions

Argentine business readers have long had two magazine traditions: the independent business magazine, represented by Mercado, founded in 1969, and the newspaper-house magazine, represented by Apertura within El Cronista. Both publish company rankings, and the similarity is instructive. Mercado's ranking measures sales; Apertura's best-known ranking measures image, a judgement of reputation by peers. The distinction captures Apertura's editorial character. It is concerned with perception, leadership, management quality and the workplace as much as with turnover, and its interview-led, profile-led pages examine how Argentine companies are led and regarded. Companies treat an Apertura ranking position as a reputational asset to be announced publicly, as law firms, agribusiness groups and industrial companies have all done. In a business culture sensitive to prestige, a magazine that certifies prestige holds a durable niche, and Apertura has held it since at least the first image ranking of 2003.

Current Status

Apertura continues as El Cronista's monthly business magazine, published in Buenos Aires in print and digital formats, with numbered editions, annual rankings of corporate image and of best employers, interviews with Argentine business leaders and coverage of companies, management and executives. No closure or suspension has been reported, and companies were citing new Apertura rankings and editions into the mid-2020s, including the 2023 best employers ranking and digital editions distributed through El Cronista's platform. For readers outside Argentina, Apertura is most easily encountered through cronista.com and the Member subscription, where the magazine forms part of the premium offer of the Spanish-speaking world's most-read economic news organisation. Its profile is that of a specialised, durable title: not the largest magazine in Argentina, but one of the most consequential inside the boardrooms it serves, where its annual verdicts on image and employment are awaited, quoted and contested every year.