The long gaze of Catalonia

Roots, talent, craft, and fair play. "Not all businesses always go well, but you have to have a long-term view and play fair both in life and in business," assured the founder and general director of Grup Bon Preu, Joan Font, in a colloquium organized by Comertia at the Ocine facilities in Les Gavarres (Tarragona). "Entrepreneurs don't explain ourselves enough, we have to talk more about values and models. Someone should make the speech about rights and duties, and we also have to identify how we can be better and different from the competition," he added in a new flurry of shared reflections to think about the art of doing business and working with rights but also with duties.

But let's go, as always, game by game, trying to focus and look long-term at the most economic Catalonia. For 35 years, Formula 1 has been smoking, accelerating, turning, and making memorable overtakes at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Liberty's historic contract with Montmeló has ---for now--- only one curve left until 2026, while in Madrid, they are already rubbing their hands over the decade of golden motorsport that they a priori have ahead. Automotive experts say that this year's edition in Spain has been a success due to the modernization of the facilities, safety, and the large public attendance, while the president of Fira Circuit, Pau Relat, has already announced that F1 in Montmeló will carry a new distinctive name for the Spanish Grand Prix. Everything points, mediterraneously, to Barcelona or Catalonia.

The president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, traveled at the end of this May to Japan and South Korea to "water" economic and institutional relations and "sow" good investment harvests. A business mission organized with the Barcelona and Spain Chambers of Commerce, which included NTT Data, Desigual, Grífols, BonÀrea, Ficosa or Werfen and which visited the Nikkei, the Kobe Biomedical Innovation Cluster, the Riken Center for Computational Science or Apple's Manufacturing R&D Accelerator, among others. The art of Joan Miró and the gastronomy of Ruscalleda and the Roca brothers were also present. Who knows if all this will lead to a direct high-flying airport connection between Barcelona and Tokyo. In this type of decisions, we are playing for the meaning of internationalization, potential investments and the projection of Catalonia in the world.

Spoiler: China will be the next international destination for the Generalitat on a business and institutional mission.

By the way, Harvard professor Michael E. Porter visited Japan years ago at the request of former US president Ronald Reagan to explore its cluster policies. This was recalled by the director of Acció's Cluster Unit, Joan Martí Estévez, during the celebration of the final event of the axis on the musculature of the Catalan business system of the IV Congress of Economy and Business of Catalonia. According to Harvard, Catalonia's cluster policy is an international reference for its continuous evolution and its pioneering character. Currently, the Generalitat's cluster policy deployed by Acció has an active participation of 3,000 companies that generate an aggregated turnover of 90,000 million euros. Professor Porter assures that a country's competitiveness is not a matter of inheritance, but of creation and innovation through cluster policy, that is, the concentration of competitive advantages. And definitively, there is no strategy without setting priorities and making renunciations.

No last-minute news on BBVA's takeover bid for Banco Sabadell. As was foreseeable and after the famous public consultation, the ball is now on the Council of Ministers' table, which has approximately one month to decide what to do or not to do for the proper functioning of the general interest beyond competition. The ministerial verdict will arrive after San Juan, and it will surely be a firecracker that will make noise here and in Brussels, which has already intoned its particular "laissez faire, laissez passer". The latest opinion note from the Círculo de Economía says no to territorial imbalance and the concentration of power in Madrid, while demanding that, if it goes ahead, "the maintenance of Banco Sabadell as an entity with its own legal personality in the form of a listed SA, with governance based on supervisory and management bodies independent of any other banking entity, an effective management headquarters in Catalonia, its own strategy approved and developed by the Board of Directors and an autonomous organizational structure" should be imposed. In short: the aim is to ensure that Banco Sabadell remains Catalan and independent as far as possible.

In terms of the real estate market, businessman Amancio Ortega (Inditex) has bought Planeta's Barcelona headquarters from the Blackstone fund for an amount close to 250 million euros. The former headquarters of Banca Catalana or BBVA is now owned by the family office Pontegadea Inversiones. Also worth noting is the purchase and rehabilitation of the historic Cine Comedia in Barcelona by the Hispano-Swiss fund Stoneweg for a value exceeding 100 million euros. In other words, the old Palacio Marcet will become the new Thyssen Museum.

As for the long view of Catalonia, we could talk about roots, skilled people or talent, the art of working and doing business, automotive, business missions and internationalization, strategy, competitive advantages and cluster policy, banking power and financing or the real estate market. The secret ingredient of well-being and happiness could not be missing either.

They say Copenhagen is the happiest city in the world, according to a ranking prepared by the Institute of Quality of Life in London. They even have their own concept called hygge to refer to a positive attitude, proximity, or well-being in its broadest sense.

I never heard a stoic like Pepe Mujica talk about hygge, but he was surely one of the people who best understood and preached that happiness comes from the simplest things: "They tell me I am the poorest president, but I don't feel poor. Poor is he who works to maintain an expensive lifestyle and wants more and more. It's a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions, you don't have to work a lifetime like a slave to maintain them, and then you have more time for yourself." Time.

The former president of Uruguay was sober in the eyes of those who knew him; he only spent on dreams and liked to always travel light to gain freedom. A freedom for which Mujica fought tirelessly in life and with enough time to give an authentic meaning to his existence. This is how he advised: "Give a meaning, a content to your existence, because if you don't do it consciously, the meaning will end up being the fee you will have to pay at the end of each month for the new gadget you have to buy, and so on until the end of your days, until one day your bones no longer rise and neither the memory nor the breath of you remains." This about meaning also applies to Catalonia.

Pepe Mujica's breath has faded, but he leaves as a good teacher with the lesson well learned: "To succeed in life is not to win, it is to get up and start over every time you fall."