Jeronimo Martins: Portugal's 200-Year-Old Retail Giant

"Normally, failures are linked to the quality of your management.”

Jeronimo Martins (JM) is a food retailer headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. I’m talking grocery stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets, discount stores, drug stores. It reminds me of Walmart. 

Similar to Walmart, it is run family-owned — the Soares dos Santos family owns 56% of the company. While Walmart was founded in 1962, JM was founded in 1792. For context on how long that is, Canada was founded under a constitution in 1867. It’s an old, old business.

JM isn’t a small rinky-dink corner grocery store in Portugal. It has ~4,400 stores in Portugal, Poland, and Columbia and employs ~118k people. It’s the largest public company in Portugal by revenue and the third-largest by market cap (~$10b USD). I should add their market leadership in Portugal and Poland is enough to make them the firth largest food retailer in the world. All to say, it’s a big family-owned operation. 

Family-owned Bias

I learned to be skeptical of family-owned companies. It sounds counterintuitive to me as an investor n…