Structural precast/prestressed concrete production in Brazil

In 1989, Joao Carlos Leonardi founded together with five other shareholders the company Leonardi Construção Industrializada Ltda, located in São Paulo, for the production of structural precast elements. The culture of Precast concrete was already present in Brazil but at that time due to the extreme changes of the inflation rate, it was very often difficult to make the decision to invest in new precast factories, and the construction market was not raising. Company structures changed in 1992, when Joao Carlos' cousin Carlos Gennari joined the company and only the two cousins remained as shareholders. Together, they are running their precast business very successfully until today. Since the introduction of the Real as official currency in Brazil in 1994, and especially after the economic crises of 1999, stable inflation rate gives much more confidence to private investors. Since 2003, Brazil's economy is constantly strongly growing, and precast concrete has become an important part of the building industry. Even if still only 5% of the cement consumption is used for precast concrete today, only, the advantages of industrialized building technologies are represented by precast more than by any other building technology, and Leonardi realized this development from the beginning.

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