Ilson Mateus: the man with the Midas touch

Thanks to the stock market entry of Grupo Mateus in October, Ilson Mateus has joined the ranks of Brazil’s billionaires – according to Bloomberg, the entrepreneur is now worth $1.6 billion. Raised by his grandparents after the death of his father when Ilson was four, his custodians were not the typical doting, over-protective grandma and grandpa. They wanted to see their grandson become a successful entrepreneur and sent him out to work from an early age, as a miner and apprentice mechanic. Born in the state of Maranhão, in the north east of the country – where one in ten live in extreme poverty – their ambition for Ilson was born as much from necessity as a sense of family pride, his teenage earnings being a vital supplement to the household income.

A head for business
At 17, his first entrepreneurial flourish saw him produce his own cachaça, the famous Brazilian hard liquor made from fermented sugar cane. Food and drink was to become his path to success. It was while he was working in the open cast mines of Serra Palada that Ilson Mateus first heard tell of Balsas, a small city in the south of the state which was earning a reputation as a soja-producing boom town. Sensing an opportunity, he decided to move there and, after gathering together money selling fizzy drinks along the roadside, opened his first shop, in 1984. Little did he know it, but the seeds for what would become Grupo Mateus had been sown.

"Not your typical CEO, Ilson quoted a verse from the bible during his company's IPO, comparing the future growth of Grupo Mateus to the construction of Noah’s Ark"

Today, Grupo Mateus is the fourth biggest supermarket chain in the country with annual turnover in excess of $1.9 billion, the results of Mateus’ strategic development that has included an aggressive pricing policy. The supermarket chain has in excess of 3,000 staff in 144 stores in the north-east of the country. Ilson serves as CEO and is the majority shareholder in Grupo Ilson. He is joined on the board by his son, Ilson Mateus Rodrigues Jr, the co-founder of Niduu, a web-based staff-training startup.

Bitter-sweet IPO
Not your typical CEO, Ilson quoted a verse from the bible during the IPO, comparing the future growth of Grupo Mateus to the construction of Noah’s Ark. The funds raised during the IPO will allow the Mateus supermarket empire to quadruple its staff in the coming years.  
The IPO celebrations were dampened with the news, a few days beforehand, of a serious accident at one of Grupo Mateus’ outlets that resulted in the death of one staff member and injuries to a dozen others.
The stock market entry of Grupo Mateus was the country’s largest IPO of 2020. More generally, the local stock market bounced back in 2020, with a record breaking 20 IPOs against just five in 2019 worth $18 billion.