According to the initial agreement, the dinner offered by Bolivian-American billionaire Marcelo Claure to President Lula, on September 24, would be a private event, for around ten guests. 40 showed up.
The reception, at Claure’s residence in New York, on the occasion of Lula’s trip to the UN General Assembly (United Nations), was only confirmed by Palácio do Planalto “three or four days before”, he says.
The 53-year-old investor has fun remembering the episode. “In the best Brazilian style, dinner grows, because the demand to see Lula is always very high. When the president arrives, he tells me that he is very tired, that he only has five minutes to speak, that he wants to eat quickly and leave. He He starts talking and talks for about 45 minutes. The president has an incredible ability to read the room, doesn’t he?” Claure told AFP. Sheetin a video call interview.
In the audience of what Claure defines as “a magical night”, there were executives from companies such as Google, Pepsi, Bank of America, TPG, General Atlantic, General Motors, as well as the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, by Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, sister of the Emir of Qatar and the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino.
The dinner for Lula was one of Claure’s several meetings with the Brazilian president in just over a year. Weeks before the event, the investor reports that he had already been received by the PT member to talk about his investments in the country. There is no record of this meeting in the president’s official agenda.
In November last year, at the invitation of the Brazilian government, Claure was part of a delegation of businessmen who accompanied Lula on an official trip to Saudi Arabia, a country where the Bolivian has business, connections and influence.
Previously, in June 2023, this time with an entry on the agenda, Claure was received at the Palácio do Planalto by Lula. He was with Josué Gomes, president of Fiesp, whose good relationship with the PT member helped open doors for the Bolivian in the Brazilian government.
Since the beginning of last year, when he began heading Shein’s operations in Latin America, Claure has also met on more than one occasion with vice-president Geraldo Alckmin, with the Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, and with the president of BNDES , Aloizio Mercadante.
Such proximity is proportional to Claure’s appetite for opportunities in Brazil. He calculates that in the last five years he invested around US$10 billion in the country, through his companies, partner funds and during his period at SoftBank – he was a pupil and later right-hand man of the legendary Masayoshi Son, founder of the Japanese fund.
But the investor, a frequent figure in the financial and business news of the world’s main vehicles, has appeared in the Brazilian media more as an executive at Shein – of which he is global vice-president.
This visibility increased when the Chinese retailer launched a crusade to try to prevent taxes on international purchases of up to US$50, the so-called ‘blouse tax’. It turns out that, as the billionaire himself explains, before being an executive at Shein, he is an investor in the company.
“I’m not an employee of Shein. I’m an investor in Shein, a value-added investor. I help the companies I invest in. So Shein is a very big investment for me, hundreds of millions of dollars, and through which I need the Shein be successful”, says Claure.
Thus, he was disconsolate with the taxation. Without wanting to give numbers, he admits that the new reality affected the company’s revenue. “Of course, the business fell a little. But it is recovering, because we are accelerating internationalization, so that Brazil is a completely domestic business.”
Transforming Shein into a national company was one of the commitments made by Claure with Lula and Haddad. “My expectation is that, by 2026, 85% of sales will be local”, he said, repeating the Finance Minister’s announcement, but reducing the deadline –Haddad mentioned until 2027. Today, according to Shein, more than 55% of sales are already locations.
It was this intention, maintains the executive, that led Shein to make an agreement with Coteminas, a textile company owned by Josué Gomes. Under the agreement, which included a loan of US$20 million (around R$100 million at the time) from the Chinese retailer to the Brazilian company, Coteminas would produce parts for Shein in Rio Grande do Norte.
The agreement never got off the ground. Shein and Coteminas reported that “the washing and final finishing stage of the pieces was not completed due to internal problems at Coteminas” and promised to insist on the partnership “as soon as the company overcomes the current moment of financial recovery” – it is in judicial recovery.
According to Claure, Brazil is Shein’s global innovation hub outside of China, a position driven by the passionate relationship that local consumers maintain with the brand. “It’s a company that gives dignity back to classes C, D and E, because it gives access to fashion to strata that didn’t have it,” he says, and takes the opportunity to skewer Brazilian legislation.
“So it shocks me when someone wants to increase taxes for classes C, D and E, but, when I arrive in Brazil, I go to Duty Free, and there they allow you to import US$1,000 paying zero [de imposto]”.
But wouldn’t the partnership with Josué/Coteminas also have been a strategy by Shein in search of shortcuts with power? Claure considers inferences of the type of competitive intrigue. “My ignorance was so great that, until recently, I didn’t know that Josué was the son of the former vice-president of Brazil”, he said, in allusion to José Alencar (1931-2011), who held the position in the first two Lula’s mandates.
“So we never used Josué because he has a good relationship with President Lula. Josué is my friend, he is a person who loves Brazil and has always acted with us in a very correct and honorable way.”
Joshua returns the praise. “I really admire foreigners who fall in love with our country, like Marcelo Claure. I think we have something to learn from them and give strength to this type of businessman.”
The affinity between the two contributed to this time Claure being the host of the dinner for Lula in New York – organized by Josué at the same time in 2023.
Welcoming the Brazilian president to his home in a way crowned Claure’s long-standing relationship with the country. Since emerging as an entrepreneur, in 2017, at cell phone distributor Brightstar, he has been dating Brazil. Remember that the company delivered phones in the Amazon region, often by truck or boat.
“Brazil has always been such a difficult place to do business that much of what we learned was in this country. I often say that any entrepreneur who knows how to do business in Brazil can do business anywhere in the world, because what is done there is always so more complex that makes the rest of the world much easier.”
Over the years, Claure discovered that “Brazil has the same quality of entrepreneurs as anywhere in the world, but it doesn’t have the same opportunities, because it lacks capital.”
To counteract the diagnosis, he invests in startups such as Mottu, Gympass and Cayena, through his family office (Claure Group) or his venture capital fund (Bicycle) – he estimates that both manage more than US$ 4 billion in own funds – , and, when at SoftBank, he has already invested in Nubank, Banco Inter and Quinto Andar, among others.
An important step in Claure’s rapprochement with Brazil was taken in October last year, when he became a partner in the investment management company eB Capital, owned by Eduardo Sirotsky Melzer, Pedro Parente and Luciana Ribeiro, which has around R$5 billion under management. The Bolivian became the second main partner, behind only Melzer, known as Duda.
“Marcelo is a turbine within our company, he brings capital, business and a lot of experience”, says Duda. “One of his great additions to Brazil is the bridge he has with Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.”
The most striking reflection of this was the holding in Brazil of a conference by the FII (Future Investment Initiative), an organization supported, among others, by the PIF (Public Investment Fund), the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia that has almost US$ 1 trillion in assets . The person who organized the Brazilian FII event – in June last year, at the Copacabana Palace – was Claure. Lula was there.
Days earlier, Alckmin had led another delegation of Brazilian businessmen to Saudi Arabia. Duda Melzer went along and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudi government through which, according to reports at the time, the Arab country’s Ministry of Investment would invest US$3.5 billion in an infrastructure fund in Brazil. The agreement has not yet come to fruition.
Claure and Duda are together in another venture related to the Saudis, the E1 Series, a global electric boat tournament sponsored by the PIF (the country’s sovereign wealth fund) in which the team owners are celebrity tycoons. Team Brazil by Claure Group competes with teams from Spanish tennis player Rafael Nadal, former American football player Tom Brady (the current leader) and actor Will Smith, among others.
It matches perfectly with the bon vivant jet-setter profile that the Bolivian cultivates along with that of an ace in business. On his social networks, Claure appears one day playing golf in front of the Red Sea, on another he is on the edge of the playing field of Girona (Spain), Bolívar (Bolivia) or New York City (USA), football teams in which he invests. in partnership with the City Football Group – from the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by the country’s royal family.
Football also helps him with political connections. “Whenever I see President Lula, he tells me that I have to look at Corinthians. I say that I need to focus on New York and Spain. I try not to compete directly with the City Group. They are my partners, so it would be a little strange to have a team that competed with them.” In Brazil, City already invests in Bahia.
Marcelo Claure was born by chance in Guatemala, where his Bolivian parents worked. He has Bolivian and American nationality. He graduated in economics and finance from Bentley College, in Massachusetts, and settled in the USA – he lives in Miami, but lives around the world.
After founding Brightstar, he was CEO of American giant Sprint. “And my third phase is that of an investor, when Masa invites me to go to Tokyo saying that he wants to teach me how to invest, that I am a good entrepreneur and a good operator, but that the investment part was missing”, he says. Masa is the nickname of SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
He became Masa’s friend and main operator and together with him he made billions with companies around the world. One of them was WeWork, from whose collapse Claure is keen to dissociate herself. “I think that if there hadn’t been a pandemic, WeWork would be a fantastic company today. And it will be, because coworking is a very strong concept when there isn’t a pandemic. For me, WeWork wasn’t a failure. While I was managing it, it gained money for the first time in its history.”
He says that, after WeWork’s IPO, there was nothing else that excited him about Softbank. “I wanted this new part of life that I call the multiplier effect: how I can apply my knowledge, capital and contacts to help other entrepreneurs.”
There is talk in the market that Claure left SoftBank with US$250 million. His personal fortune is now valued by Forbes at US$2 billion. Among his Brazilian friends are Jorge Paulo Lemann (3G Capital), Guilherme Benchimol (XP) and André Esteves (BTG) – although, as one source notes, the last two also see him as a threatening competitor.
The 2 meter tall investor (“I’m the tallest Bolivian there is”) jokes that he has “190 investments, six children, a wife and three football teams” and says that his work life and personal life are one. “When we make investments, we use two metrics: return on fun and return on investment. So everything we do are things that entertain us, that fascinate us.”
X-ray
Marcelo Claure, 53
Born in Guatemala, to Bolivian parents, he has Bolivian and American nationality. He graduated in economics and finance from Bentley College (USA). He founded Brightstar (cell phone distributor), was CEO of Sprint and VP of SoftBank, where he left to found a family office (Claure Group) and a fund management company (Bicycle). He is a partner at the Brazilian eB Capital and global vice president at Shein.
- US$10 billion is how much he estimates he has invested in Brazil in the last five years
- US$4 billion is how much you estimate your companies manage in their own funds
- $2 billion is his personal fortune, according to Forbes
