About Mercado

Mercado

Mercado is an Argentine business magazine published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Coyuntura S.A., with its website at mercado.com.ar. Founded in 1969, it is one of Argentina's oldest business magazines and is widely described in its own institutional history as the first publication of the economy and business genre known in the country. For more than five decades Mercado has covered companies, management, marketing, finance and the economy, and it built its reputation above all on original research, most famously the Ranking of the companies that sell the most in Argentina, which grew from an initial hundred companies to the ranking of 1,000 companies that became a reference for Argentine business. Based for many years at Perú 263 in Buenos Aires, Mercado is a Spanish-language magazine whose history is inseparable from the professionalisation of Argentine business journalism itself.

Foundation on 17 July 1969

The first issue of Mercado went on sale on 17 July 1969. The magazine's own anniversary history records that by its 900th edition it had delivered some 65,000 pages punctually, through a period in which, by its count, 14 presidents of the Republic and 23 economy ministers had held office since 1969, a statistic the magazine offered to illustrate the turbulence and volatility in which Argentina had lived, especially before the restoration of democracy in 1983. The founding team, described in Mercado's own retrospective as a luxury team, consisted of director Julián Delgado, the inspirer of the group; deputy director Alberto Borrini; editor in chief Mario Sekiguchi; and general manager Raúl H. Sarmiento. Delgado was a talented economic journalist and the undisputed leader of the enterprise. Borrini's singular contribution, in the magazine's account, was to discover marketing and management for a generation of executives and businesspeople who sensed they needed those tools to grow, and to establish that advertising and marketing were themselves newsworthy subjects in Argentina.

The Founders and the First Era, 1969 to 1983

Mercado's institutional history divides its life into stages, and insists on an unusual trait: through the three stages of the company's structure, leadership and shareholding power remained always in the hands of professional journalists, a feature the magazine itself calls uncommon in the Argentine media landscape. The first stage runs from the foundation in 1969 to 1983. In that period Mario Sekiguchi turned the Finance section into obligatory reading both for those immersed in the activity and for those who knew nothing about it, while Raúl Sarmiento brought order and organisation to journalists' often chaotic work, giving solidity and seriousness to the young company. The era ended in tragedy for the founding group. Julián Delgado, the director and inspirer of Mercado, was disappeared during the military dictatorship in 1978. The magazine continued, witnessing, in its own words, years of irrational violence, broken institutional order, censorship and attacks on freedom of expression, and its survival through that period forms a central part of its identity.

The Second Era and Editorial Continuity

The second stage identified by the magazine ran from 1983, the year democracy returned to Argentina, to 1990, and was characterised by the handover from the founding team to the magazine's then second line of command. The new director was Gerardo López Alonso, praised in Mercado's retrospective as perhaps the finest literary pen of its three decades to that point, a reflective intellectual with a love of historical themes and a notable teacher. The deputy director was Edgardo A. Silveti, described as one of the most meticulous reporters of all time, responsible for memorable sectoral investigations that illuminated almost unknown sectors of the local economy. That carefully recorded succession matters because it shows a magazine conscious of its own institutional memory. Mercado did not present itself as the vehicle of a single proprietor but as a journalistic company renewing its leadership from within, preserving its methods, its rankings and its business readership across Argentina's passage from dictatorship to democracy and through the economic upheavals that followed.

The Ranking of Companies

No product defines Mercado more than its rankings. The Ranking of the companies that sell the most in Argentina began modestly with about a hundred companies and grew to cover a thousand, becoming the Ranking of the 1,000 companies. The magazine then ranked companies in many other ways: those that export the most, those that invest the most, and those that provide products and services of the best quality, among others. Surviving editions show the scale and method of the exercise. One ranking edition analysed the joint sales of the 1,000 companies, totalling 72,904 million in the currency of the time, with the oil sector leading by sector, followed by food, services and commerce, and published detailed sector tables covering automobiles and parts, steel, beverages, laboratories, transport, textiles, and dozens of other categories, with averages per company and each sector's share of the total. Another account records Mercado survey findings on the top 1,000 and top 2,200 companies, including sectoral productivity measured as sales per employee. For Argentine managers, the ranking numbers were an annual point of reference for the size and movement of the corporate sector.

Content: Companies, Management, Marketing and Finance

Beyond the rankings, Mercado's content covered the full agenda of a business magazine of its generation: company strategy and results, management, marketing and advertising, finance, and the wider economy and its public policies. Borrini's founding insight, that marketing and management were news, shaped a magazine that taught as well as reported, introducing Argentine executives to disciplines that were then new in the country. Its pages followed emblematic Argentine companies over decades. One retrospective on Argentine companies that survived in national hands tracked firms that had remained in every Mercado ranking from 1969 to 1996 among the hundred companies with the highest turnover, and examined cases such as Aceitera General Deheza, the largest exporting company of Córdoba, Molinos Río de la Plata, Laboratorios Bagó, Arcor, which in 1995 obtained more than 55 million dollars in profits and consolidated its presence in more than 60 countries, and supermarket chains that climbed the turnover rankings against strong foreign competitors. That long corporate memory, firm by firm and ranking by ranking, is a distinctive part of Mercado's value to business historians.

Buenos Aires Base and Publishing Details

Mercado is published by Editorial Coyuntura S.A. in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. A surviving print masthead records the publisher's address at Perú 263, 2nd floor, Buenos Aires, membership of the Asociación Argentina de Editores de Revistas, the Argentine association of magazine publishers, its intellectual property registration and trademark, its ISSN 0325-0667, and its distribution arrangements in the capital and Greater Buenos Aires and in the interior of the country, with subscriptions offered within Argentina and abroad at differentiated prices for neighbouring countries and the rest of the Americas. Those dry details confirm the magazine's national ambition: a Buenos Aires business magazine that expected to be read wherever Argentine companies operated, including by Argentine business readers abroad. Its numbering also testifies to longevity. Mercado celebrated its 900th edition and was publishing editions numbered above 1,190 by March 2017, a count consistent with decades of regular publication since 1969 in a market where, by the magazine's own estimate in its 900th-edition editorial, the average life of the many magazines on the newsstands was only five years.

Mercado and Argentine Business Culture

Mercado appeared at the right moment, as its own chronicler put it: the right publication at the right time. Argentina in 1969 had company managers, advertisers and financiers who lacked a specialised national magazine of economy and business, and Mercado created that space. It professionalised the reading habits of executives, made rankings and sector analysis part of ordinary business conversation, and treated advertising and marketing as serious economic activities worthy of journalism. The founding team's presence at the World Advertising Congress in Tokyo in 1969, the year of foundation, and the story the magazine tells of winning a Clio award there, illustrate the international advertising world into which the young magazine immediately stepped. Over the following decades, to follow Mercado was to follow the transformation of Argentine business itself: state companies shrinking as a share of the largest firms' sales, oil and gas and automobiles rising in the rankings, retail becoming the largest employer among the top companies, and national groups confronting foreign competitors after market opening. The magazine recorded those shifts in data as well as in narrative.

Audience and Influence

Mercado's readers have been executives, managers, entrepreneurs, advertisers, financiers and students of business, a specialised audience rather than a mass one, but an influential one. Contemporary analyses of Argentine magazine circulation in the late 1970s already grouped Mercado with the top end of the market, among specialised publications whose readership held up differently from mass fotonovelas and women's magazines during the dictatorship years. Its influence is best measured not in raw copies but in usage: its rankings were cited by companies, reproduced in business discussion and used as a source on the Argentine corporate sector by outside observers, including Latin American news services reporting its survey results on the top companies, their sales and their productivity. A business magazine that governments, boards and competitors all read for the same tables occupies a particular position in a country's economic life, and Mercado held that position in Argentina for decades through dictatorships, hyperinflation, convertibility, crisis and recovery.

Digital Presence at Mercado.com.ar

Mercado continues online at mercado.com.ar, the website recorded for the magazine, where its archive of editions and articles, including historic ranking editions and anniversary histories, remains accessible. The digital archive is itself a significant part of the magazine's present value: decades of company rankings, sector investigations and business chronicles can be consulted there, preserving material that would otherwise exist only in print collections. The magazine's web presence follows the pattern of Argentine specialised print media, in which the website carries the brand, the current business coverage and the back catalogue together. For researchers, the ability to read Mercado's own accounts of its foundation, its founders and its rankings in its own pages online provides primary evidence for the history of Argentine business journalism. For business readers, the site extends the magazine's original promise, timely and ordered information about Argentine companies and the economy, into a medium its founders, working in 1969 with print and congresses, could only anticipate in outline.

Current Status and Legacy

Mercado remains an active Argentine business magazine published from Buenos Aires, with a living website and an unbroken identity reaching back to its first issue of 17 July 1969. Its legacy rests on three pillars. First, priority: it was, by its own documented account, the first economy and business publication of its kind in Argentina. Second, data: its rankings, above all the Ranking of the 1,000 companies that sell the most, created an enduring public record of the Argentine corporate sector, its sectors, its sales and its employment. Third, people: a founding team of professional journalists, Julián Delgado, Alberto Borrini, Mario Sekiguchi and Raúl Sarmiento, whose leadership remained journalistic through successive eras, and whose story includes the disappearance of its founding director under the dictatorship in 1978. A magazine that survived the conditions Mercado survived, while continuing to count and rank the country's companies year after year, has earned its description as one of Argentina's oldest and most significant business publications.