Francisco Eloy Sanchez Medialdea

Mr. Eloy Sanchez is the former export manager of Celsa Barcelona.

IREPAS was born in very late 70’s,  as an idea to share relevant market information between rebar producers, at a time when most advanced communication system were phone and telex. Also most reliable and updated source of information were yellow pages!

At that time Ricardo Hugas and Eloy Sanchez from Celsa were very active in the markets of the Middle Eastern and Gulf countries. They thought it would be a good idea to contact some Brazilian mills, which were also selling their products in the same market. So they started digging out in International Yellow pages, that were only available at central headquarters of Telefonica ( the only Spanish communication company at that time) in Madrid. After 6 months and huge level of patience, as all international phone calls were going through centralized switchboards, they could finally contact the right people in Brazil and organize a meeting in Frankfurt. The venue was nothing fancy, just the airport. The attendance was below 10 people between Spanish and Brazilians. The target for this first meeting was to open channels of communication to share market information and it was achieved. Producers could then understand better what was going on in the markets and that was a big help to establish sound price and distribution policies.