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Gonzalo Guerrero, current director of SQM.
He could be the fourth president of SQM after the thirty-year cycle headed by Julio Ponce Lerou and which ended in 2015, as a result of cases of irregular financing of politics. Julio Ponce was succeeded by businessman Juan Antonio Guzmán, first; his brother Eugenio Ponce Lerou, later; and since 2018 the former president of the CPC, Alberto Salas, whose name was agreed with Corfo as part of the agreements that renewed SQM’s rights to lithium in exchange for a higher payment to the Treasury and changes to its corporate governance. Salas will no longer be a member of the board and Pampa Calichera, the group with the most power in SQM, controlled by Ponce, is free to propose and choose his successor. Y the most likely name is that of Gonzalo Guerrero Yamamoto, who is running for the Japanese Kowa, a historic ally of Ponce. If ratified at the end of April, Guerrero will be the fifth president of SQM since 1987. And he will lead the company that today has the highest stock market value in the market, with more than US$23 billion.
SQM has a board election on April 26 and there are nine candidates for eight seats. But there are seven who are practically elected: the seven candidates of the strategic series A. The shareholders who nominate their candidates have enough shares to elect them. Calichera, Julio Ponce’s group, is re-nominating Patricio Contesse Fica and former minister Hernán Büchi, as well as nurse Gina Ocqueteau. Tianqi, for its part, will choose the Australian Ashley Ozols, the former chief correspondent of the Xinhua agency in Latin America Dang Qi and the Chilean Antonio Schneider. The seventh director will be Gonzalo Guerrero, for Kowa. And the eighth, elected by series B, will be the only one where there will be competition, between former minister Laurence Golborne, who has a wide advantage among the ADRs, and former CEO of Moneda Asset, Antonio Gil, AFP candidate.
Until last March, the president of SQM had to be Alberto Salas, an independent director. This was agreed in 2018 by Corfo and Pampa Calichera, an obligation that has already expired and that now allows the main shareholder of SQM to vote discretionally for the company’s leader. The position of president is relevant. According to the company’s bylaws, in the event of a tie in board discussions, the president has a leading role that has already been used before.
The Pampa group had a dilemma to choose the successor of Salas. Although Patricio Contesse Fica, today the company’s vice president, was an option for that position, his historical closeness to Julio Ponce could add a liability to the company, especially with a government of a different sign than the previous ones, hostile to the private presence in the lithium business. Contesse, right arm of the former president of SQM, is the son of the former general manager of the same name who accompanied Ponce until 2015. The same discomfort with the new authorities could occur with Büchi, former finance minister in the years of Augusto Pinochet. And, finally, Ocqueteau has just arrived at the company and, for that very reason, he ruled himself out for the position.
Given the relevance of the position, Pampa prefers someone who is known and who is close to the group. And Guerrero has it.
A former director of the waterfalls
Gonzalo Guerrero, a lawyer from the University of Chile, has been at SQM for six years. He arrived in 2016, after the reorganization of the company’s table after the fateful 2015. His business career is extensive: he was prosecutor and alternate director for more than seven years of Integramédica, the network of medical centers that he founded and in 2010 his father, Francisco Guerrero Novoa, and his partners sold for several tens of millions of dollars. He has also been director of Asfaltos Chilenos for 8 years, Vantrust Capital Asset Management and the Palestinian sports club.
But his closeness to Ponce comes from further back. Between May 2013 and April 2016 he was director of Oro Blanco, one of the links in the cascades that end at SQM. In that period he coincided with Julio Ponce himself, who was president of Oro Blanco, his brother Luis Eugenio and his daughter Francisca Ponce. Guerrero participated in the Cascades in the turbulent period between the Cascades case and the discovery of the political payments. His resume shows another connection with Ponce: Between 2004 and 2007, Guerrero was a partner at Calderón y Compañía, the law firm run by his mother-in-law, lawyer Darío Calderón, one of Julio Ponce’s best friends.
From his position as director of SQM, Guerrero took on a special assignment from the board: to strengthen the company’s ties with the communities surrounding the Atacama salt flat, where SQM concentrates its main operations. Guerrero, who is part of the company’s Health, Safety and Environment committee, has organized talks with local authorities and leaders to which directors of the mining company have been invited and has participated in virtual dialogues carried out through the local channel Lickan TV. In his first chapter of a series called “Conversations with Soqui,” Guerrero said he came from a family that was not of great fortune and had studied at a subsidized school. According to those who have met him, he has the skills for this assignment: he is affable, good-natured, a great conversationalist who usually generates empathy in his counterparts. For that reason, those who know him believe, in the exercise of law he developed a streak as a mediator and settler of conflicts.
As a student, he was politically close to Renovación Nacional: he was vice president of the secondary school in Hernán Büchi’s campaign, with whom he now shares a directory, and at the university he presided over the RN university front and was a candidate for president of the student union. He has a brother, Xavier, a disciple of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who left industrial engineering, at the risk of being disinherited, to dedicate himself to cinema.
In the program online of Lickan TV, Guerrero has also assumed the wounds of SQM’s past scandals, a bad image that the company ratified in a consultancy commissioned by McKinsey a few years ago. In September 2021, In a dialogue with the mayor of San Pedro, Justo Zuleta, Guerrero said: “The great person responsible for the distrust of us today is ourselves. We have situations in the past that have clouded our image. We are constantly overcoming that. We are calm with our past. But for people to believe us, we have to prove that with facts”, he was sincere.
The condition of director of SQM is one of the most profitable in the Chilean market. In 2021, for example, for fixed and variable payments and committees, Guerrero received $303 million in gross compensation. In 2020 it was $384 million. Last year, however, he got a little more. According to SQM’s 2021 report, Guerrero agreed with the company on a “consulting contract” that does not detail reasons or amounts. But it was the board of directors that agreed to remunerate Guerrero’s work with the northern communities, at the proposal of the general manager, Ricardo Ramos. The position of president of SQM, however, is the best paid. In 2021, Alberto Salas earned $480 million and a year earlier, $706 million.
Guerrero represents Kowa, a Japanese company that was a historical ally of Ponce: for years they had a joint action pact that they had to formally undo by order of Corfo. Son of Jessica Yamamoto, he has said that his maternal last name facilitated his approach to Kowa.
If everything goes according to plan, at the end of April he will be the new president of SQM. The highest business position you will hold in December, when you turn 50