Televisa is the leading telecommunications firm in Latin America today and provides programming for networks and stations in Spanish-speaking countries around the world. The company has been a major supplier to Spanish language stations in the United States. At the same time, the United States remains an elusive goal for Televisa, which has at various times undertaken projects intended to make a major impact on the U.S. market, projects that failed. Televisa's strength in its own market has recently been questioned as competition comes to its markets, competition in part from U.S. companies.
Emilio Azcarraga has a net worth of some $2.8 billion and may be the richest man in Latin America. In 1930 his father founded one of Mexico's first radio stations and built that into a Mexican communications empire. The father died in 1972, and the son built on his father's legacy and today controls television, radio, publishing, and satellite properties under the corporate banner of Televisa, now a publicly held stock. The market values Televisa at $3.4 billion, and Azcarraga owns 65 percent of the 309 million shares. Azcarraga, also known as El Tigre, or The Tiger, is a reclusive man who never meets the press. Even his age is uncertain, though he is thought to be about 60.
Azcarraga is Latin America's most powerful media baron. Televisa is a four-channel broadcast television network. Azcarraga originally had several partners, but he bought them out a few years ago and put the company on the stock exchange to raise funds. He used the proceeds to buy other media outlets and extended his media empire from Chile to San Francisco. In addition to his acquisition of radio and television stations and networks, he made his own print media buys independent of Televisa, buying a controlling interest in the Miami-based Grupo America, a major Spanish-language magazine distributor, and in Ovaciones, a Mexican newspaper known for its ent...