Norberto Odebrecht, who founded one of Latin America’s largest engineering companies, Odebrecht, died Saturday of heart failure in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
The founder and honorary chairman of the Odebrecht Group, built a successful business with a 70-year history, made up of 15 businesses, three investment funds and five auxiliary companies. The Odebrecht Group is active in 23 countries and has nearly 200,000 members.
At the age of 15, Odebrecht started working at his father’s construction company, Emílio Odebrecht & Cia. and eventually took over at the age of 21.
In 1944, he founded Construtora Norberto Odebrecht and in the 60s, he expanded the construction company and took it nationwide, diversified its operations in the following decade, and went on to internationalize its businesses.
In 1991, Norberto Odebrecht transferred the helm of Odebrecht SA, the group’s holding company, to his son Emílio Odebrecht and then became chairman of the board until Emílio succeeded him in 1998. Today, his son Emílio Odebrecht is still chairman of the board of Odebrecht and his grandson Marcelo Odebrecht is president and CEO.
Odebrecht’s gross revenue grew 16% in 2013 to US$43.5 billion. Some of the company’s notable projects include floating production storage and offloading rigs for deepwater oil exploration. This includes the establishment of a joint venture between Odebrecht Oil & Gas and Teekay to run the FPSO Cidade de Itajai, which is under a 9-year charter by Brazil’s Petrobras. The Cidade de Itajai can process 80,000bo/d.
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