Alejandro Betancourt López

Uber paid €220 million in February 2025 for a 30% stake in Auro New Transport Concept, a Madrid-based company most people outside Spain’s transport sector had never heard of.

The deal valued Auro’s equity at €180 million and included €40 million in assumed debt. It ranks among Uber’s largest single-country investments in Europe.

The transaction didn’t materialize overnight. Alejandro Betancourt López, who co-founded Auro, had spent nearly eight years accumulating the one asset no ride-hailing app can function without in Spain: VTC licenses.

Those permits, purchased for a fraction of their eventual worth, gave Auro control over more than 3,000 licenses and a fleet of 3,500 employed drivers across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Málaga. By the time Uber came to the table, Auro was the only partner that could offer scale.

What a VTC License Is and Why It Matters?

Spain regulates ride-hailing through a permit system called VTC (vehículo de turismo con conductor), which requires a government-issued license for every vehicle operating on a platform like Uber or Cabify.

A 2015 law under Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy capped the number of VTC permits at one for every 30 taxi licenses. The cap created an artificial ceiling on supply.

Each license became a scarce commodity. Regions handled enforcement differently: Catalonia and Valencia imposed mandatory 15-minute advance booking windows that destroyed the instant-request appeal of app-based services.

Uber left both regions entirely. Madrid took a different path, allowing existing VTC licenses to operate for urban trips under a more permissive framework.

That regional divide created a concentrated opportunity for anyone willing to stockpile permits in the markets where ride-hailing could actually function.

How Alejandro Betancourt Lopez Built Spain’s Ride-hailing Fleet?

Alejandro Betancourt López recognized the Spanish regulatory bottleneck before most institutional investors were paying attention.

“When we started the traveling business in Spain, Auro, we knew that Uber was going to come to Spain and we started accumulating all the licenses,” he told ABC Money.

Auro was founded in 2017, backed by €10 million in early funding from GP Bullhound and FJ Labs, with co-founders Félix Ruiz and Zaryn Dentzel.

The company’s first move was buying VTC permits from taxi operators who saw little value in them. Licenses that changed hands for roughly €5,000 each would later anchor a company valued at hundreds of millions.

Betancourt López described the bet in a 2020 interview: “It was a high-risk bet, because we were confident, but were not certain that this will happen. It was a projection.”

The math behind the thesis, as he later outlined in a detailed account of his positioning method, was straightforward. Spain’s 1:30 ratio law had capped the total license pool.

Demand from platforms like Uber and Cabify would only grow as urban populations expanded and personal car ownership leveled off. Whoever held the permits held the keys.

From License Holder to Full-Stack Operator

Auro didn’t stop at accumulation. The company built its own driver workforce, hired 200 headquarters staff, and developed a proprietary ride-request app.

It signed an exclusivity agreement with Cabify in 2018, locking its fleet into a single platform in exchange for a guaranteed revenue floor.

That exclusivity deal also constrained Auro’s upside. Cabify had access to the fleet, but Auro couldn’t work with competitors.

The constraint broke open in December 2024, when Spain’s Constitutional Court overturned a lower court ruling that had supported Cabify’s exclusivity claim. The decision freed Auro to negotiate with any platform it chose.

Uber moved quickly. The 18-month negotiation that followed produced the €220 million deal, with Uber calling Spain a “priority market” and citing the acquisition as proof of its commitment to the country.

Co-founder Félix Ruiz described it bluntly: “It was probably the most difficult sale, but it’s the one where I’ve made the most money.”

A Regulatory Bet, Not a Technology Bet

The Auro story diverges from the standard ride-hailing startup narrative in one respect: where the competitive advantage sits.

Most mobility startups compete on software, pricing, or brand. Auro competed on permits. Its moat was legal and finite, an attribute he has identified as a recurring theme across his most successful deals.

Alejandro Betancourt López has described his investment approach as people-first and conviction-driven.

“There are 10,000 good ideas out there, but not all of them come to be a successful venture because there are many factors that make them successful,” he said in a 2023 interview. “For me, the most important one, the critical one, is the people.”

At Auro, the people bet was paired with a structural bet on regulation. The license pool wouldn’t expand. The platforms would need someone who already held a large share of it.

The company now generates approximately €9 million in EBITDA with its fleet of 3,500+ drivers across four Spanish cities.

Auro has also committed to converting its entire fleet to electric or eco-emission vehicles, with 100 Tesla Model 3s already incorporated through a partnership with Tesla and Uber.

After the Deal

Uber’s 30% stake gives it access to Spain’s largest VTC fleet without the regulatory headaches of building one from scratch. For Auro, the deal validates a thesis that was eight years in the making and provides capital to expand operations.

The broader signal concerns where value sits in regulated mobility markets. Platforms can scale software globally; they can’t scale permits.

Every country with a licensing regime creates the same structural opportunity for operators willing to acquire the supply side before demand catches up.

Alejandro Betancourt López bet that Spain’s ride-hailing future would be determined by whoever controlled the licenses, a conviction he has credited to persistent mental rehearsal and scenario planning. The Uber check suggests he was right.

Originally published at https://www.idobusiness.co.uk on April 15, 2026.

A single storefront opened in a shopping mall in Mexico City last December — the first Hawkers franchise outside Spain. The sunglasses brand, which began with a $300 investment in Elche, Spain, in 2013, had spent a decade selling almost exclusively online. Now its president, Alejandro Betancourt López, was betting that the next stage of growth required something the company had long avoided: handing the keys to independent operators.

Hawkers closed 2023 with roughly €55 million in revenue, a figure split across three channels — 44% from online sales, 34% from company-owned stores, and 22% from wholesale. Reaching the €100 million target for 2026 means the company needs to nearly double its top line in three years, and the franchise model, tested first in the Mexican market that already accounts for 35% to 40% of total sales, sits at the center of that plan.

From Dorm-Room E-Commerce to 70 Storefronts

Four friends pooled $300 in late 2013 to launch a sunglasses brand out of Elche, a small city in southeastern Spain better known for shoe manufacturing. Their pitch was straightforward: sell sunglasses that looked like $150 Ray-Bans for €20 to €25. Facebook, still cheap as an advertising platform, became the engine. Early campaigns averaged about €1 spent per sale, a ratio that would become unthinkable within a few years as ad costs climbed.

Hawkers shipped 30,000 free pairs to social media influencers, a tactic that was still novel enough to generate outsized returns. By 2015, the brand had become one of the most-followed eyewear labels on social media across southern Europe and Latin America.

Alejandro Betancourt López entered the picture in November 2016. He invested €50 million for a 25% stake and took over as president, giving Hawkers both capital and a mandate to professionalize operations according to his professional background. Leadership turnover followed. Some directors were replaced; others were promoted. Betancourt López, in a 2023 interview, described the goal as keeping “only strong performers” and building management capable of sustaining 40% year-over-year growth.

Why Physical Retail, and Why Now

Leaving pure e-commerce behind wasn’t entirely voluntary. Facebook advertising costs rose sharply after 2017, and the economics that once let Hawkers acquire customers for €1 eroded. Alejandro Betancourt López pushed the company into brick-and-mortar retail, opening more than 80 stores, primarily across Spain and Portugal, before paring the network back to around 65 to 67 locations based on per-store profitability data.

Wholesale partnerships and marketplace listings on Amazon and Mercado Libre added volume, though at thinner margins. Hawkers’ leadership accepted the trade-off: Amazon’s customer trust drove trial purchases that sometimes converted into direct repeat buyers. Revenue surpassed $100 million across all channels by 2024, with the company operating over 70 stores and manufacturing partnerships in Elche, Italy, and China.

Pedro Beneyto, appointed CEO in May 2022 after holding senior positions at optical chain Alain Afflelou and Grupo Suárez, arrived with a mandate to push Hawkers beyond its sunglasses niche. Beneyto outlined three pillars for growth: international expansion, franchise system development, and building out an optical retail network. He told Optimoda, the Spanish trade publication, that he aimed to “amplify the optical sector offerings” — an area where his background in prescription eyewear gave him particular confidence.

His logic was particular to eyewear retail: optical frame sales require licensed opticians and locally regulated supply chains, making company-owned stores expensive to operate at a distance. Franchising lets Hawkers enter those markets without bearing the full capital load.

Building the Product In-House

COVID-19 revealed a vulnerability Hawkers hadn’t fully accounted for. Supply chain disruptions from Chinese factories delayed shipments and exposed the company to production bottlenecks it couldn’t control. By early 2021, Betancourt López had committed to building an in-house manufacturing facility, a decision that required significant capital, consistent with Betancourt López’s investment track record across multiple sectors, but promised both margin improvement and supply reliability.

Within two years, the factory scaled from 30,000 units per month to 90,000. Hawkers invested in Italian injection-molding machinery, with individual molds costing up to €80,000, compared with roughly $10,000 for equivalent Chinese tooling. Polished molds produce glossy and matte surfaces without paint, a process that also allows the factory to recycle defective raw material back into production batches. Chinese competitors, whose molds rely on painted or stickered finishes, can’t recirculate material contaminated by those coatings.

Controlling manufacturing had a measurable impact on both sales figures and customer perception of quality, according to company production leads. Owning the line also gave Hawkers flexibility to prototype and iterate on new models faster than competitors dependent on third-party factories with long lead times.

Mexico as Proving Ground

Mexico didn’t become Hawkers’ largest market by accident. A sponsorship deal with Formula 1 driver Sergio “Checo” Pérez amplified brand awareness across Latin America, and by the early 2020s, the country generated 35% to 40% of total revenue. When Hawkers opened its first franchise location in a Mexico City mall in December 2023, it was choosing the market where its brand carried the most weight.

Franchising makes particular sense for markets where Hawkers already has consumer recognition but limited physical presence. Rather than financing store buildouts and hiring local staff directly, Hawkers licenses the brand to operators who shoulder real estate and employment costs. Betancourt López in a 2022 interview described Hawkers as “number three eyewear brand globally in e-commerce” — a claim difficult to verify independently but consistent with third-party estimates of the brand’s online reach.

Hawkers has also maintained motorsport sponsorship agreements through 2025, including partnerships with MotoGP athletes Luca Marini and Pierre Gasly, a shift from purely influencer-driven marketing to collaborations that emphasize performance and precision. Combined with presence in over 80 countries, the sponsorships give the franchise program a broader pull than a brand of Hawkers’ size might ordinarily command.

Reaching €100 Million

Getting from €55 million to €100 million in three years is aggressive. Hawkers’ path depends on a combination that hasn’t been fully tested at this scale: franchise-driven geographic expansion, category diversification into optical frames, and manufacturing cost advantages from its Elche factory — a combination one analysis described as an exercise in vertical integration. Each piece carries risk. Franchise operators may not replicate the brand experience that company-owned stores deliver. Optical retail demands different expertise than fashion sunglasses. And factory economics depend on volume staying high enough to justify the capital expenditure.

Beneyto’s bet on optical frames does add a recurring-revenue dimension that pure sunglasses retail lacks. People replace prescription lenses more predictably than they buy fashion sunglasses, and optical customers tend to return to familiar retail environments. If franchise operators can cross-sell optical products alongside Hawkers’ core sunglasses line, the unit economics of each location improve considerably.

Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt allocated €20 million in capital investment for 2024 to support growth across five areas: international expansion, retail development, product innovation, sustainability, and digital transformation. Meanwhile, the factory in Elche keeps running at 90,000 units a month, turning out frames that never touch paint and never leave the company’s quality control loop. Whether all of it, manufacturing control, brand heat from a decade of social-media savvy, and a CEO recruited specifically to build franchises, adds up to €100 million by year’s end remains an open question, and one Hawkers will have to answer with stores, not spreadsheets.

Originally published at https://www.deadlinenews.co.uk on April 6, 2026.

Artificial intelligence captured 53% of all global venture capital deal value by the third quarter of 2025, according to WIPO’s Global Innovation Index, with Northern America alone absorbing roughly $162 billion. Single rounds for Anthropic ($13 billion) and xAI ($10 billion) in Q3 2025 illustrated how concentrated the capital flow had become. The money arrived after the thesis had already been proven.

The Thesis Behind the Timing

Betancourt López did not frame his AI conviction around a specific product or model architecture. His argument was structural: AI would become the primary efficiency layer across every sector, and the companies building that layer would capture a disproportionate share of value.

“What is AI? It’s a machine that thinks faster and finds solutions faster,” he said in the same interview. “So AI just makes everything more efficient. So it’s not only in energy. In anything.” The reasoning parallels a broader pattern across his career: identify where a supply constraint or efficiency bottleneck will concentrate value, then position capital before the market reaches consensus.

That pattern had already played out with Auro Travel, where he accumulated scarce ride-hailing licenses in Spain years before Uber’s €220 million investment in 2025. The AI bet followed the same logic. The difference was the asset class: equity in a private technology company rather than government permits.

O’Hara Administration and How the Bet Fits

O’Hara Administration , founded in 2014, functions as Betancourt López’s family office. The firm spans private equity, venture capital, commercial real estate, and co-investments alongside institutional partners. Its portfolio includes Hawkers (eyewear), Auro Travel (mobility), BDK Financial Group (West African banking), and the undisclosed AI position.

Early Capital in a Late-Consensus Market

The WIPO data reveals just how dramatically the market has shifted since Betancourt López entered his position. AI’s share of global VC deal value jumped from roughly 32% in Q3 2024 to 53% in Q3 2025, a 21-percentage-point swing in a single year. Northern America absorbed over four-fifths of that capital. Total global VC for 2025 was projected at approximately $490 billion, with AI companies claiming the majority.

For an investor who entered around 2019 or 2020, the implications are straightforward. Pre-boom AI positions benefit from the valuation inflation that institutional capital creates when it arrives in volume. A private company worth $500 million in 2020 could plausibly reach $10 billion by 2025 without changing its underlying business, carried upward by the sector repricing that accompanies a tenfold increase in capital flow. The 20x figure Betancourt López cites is consistent with that pattern.

The geographic concentration of AI capital adds another dimension. European investors who entered early had fewer domestic options but could access U.S. deals through co-investment networks. O’Hara Administration’s structure as a co-investor alongside institutional partners positions it for exactly that kind of access.

People First, Then the Spreadsheet

His self-assessment includes candor about limitations. “I’m a good buyer, but I’m a terrible seller,” he acknowledged in the same interview, describing a tendency to hold losing positions too long. The AI investment, at least, rewarded that instinct to stay in.

Where O’Hara Goes Next

O’Hara Administration’s current focus areas include artificial intelligence, robotics, and technology manufacturing, according to published reports. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López has framed all three as part of the same thesis: that physical-world applications of AI will generate the next concentration of value.

Originally published at https://www.wales247.co.uk on April 3, 2026.

Alejandro Betancourt López, chairman of O’Hara Administration, made a large AI investment roughly five years before the current generative AI wave. By February 2025, that position had returned approximately 20 times its original value. This article examines what he saw early, when most institutional capital was still skeptical, and what his timing reveals about how pattern recognition functions as an investment tool.

The story of his AI bet is not a story about technology. It is a story about reading cycles before they become visible to the broader market.

Betancourt addressed the investment directly, though he declined to name the company due to confidentiality agreements:

“I have a big investment I made about five years ago in AI, and now it’s exploding, that when I invested again it wasn’t a big thing. So I think I got lucky. I’m not going to tell you I’m a visionary that I thought… But I thought it was a great idea. I did a big ticket on it and now it’s 20 times its investment.”

Later in the same conversation, he returned to the subject :

“Well, of course you can see that AI is exploding right now and everything is around that, so everybody’s talking about it. And we invested about five years ago, so we’re now very excited.”

The timeline places his entry point at approximately 2019 or 2020. ChatGPT did not launch publicly until November 2022. The generative AI investment wave that followed came later still. According to the Stanford HAI 2024 AI Index Report, generative AI funding grew from a fraction of the overall market to $25.2 billion by 2023, nearly eight times the prior year’s figure. Betancourt’s position predates that expansion by several years.

O’Hara Administration, the investment group he has led since 2014 , functions as a multidisciplinary family office with a mandate covering private equity, venture capital, and technology. The AI bet fits that mandate precisely: a pre-consensus entry into a category most institutional money had not yet priced.

The period between 2019 and 2020 was a specific moment in the AI investment cycle. The technology had demonstrated real capabilities in narrow applications — machine translation, image recognition, recommendation systems — but the general-purpose AI wave had not yet arrived. The broader investment market remained cautious about when, or whether, the technology would produce returns at scale.

That caution had a direct effect on valuations. According to the Stanford HAI 2024 AI Index Report, global private AI investment declined for two consecutive years following its 2021 peak, suggesting the broader market was pulling back at the precise moment the underlying technology was strengthening. Companies that attracted capital in 2019 and 2020 did so at prices set by a market that had not yet registered what was coming.

The adoption numbers tell the same story from a different angle. McKinsey data cited in the Stanford HAI report shows organizational AI adoption stood at roughly 50% in 2022, up from only 20% in 2017. In contrast, the Stanford HAI 2025 AI Index found that number had reached 78% by 2024. This means the bulk of corporate adoption occurred well after Betancourt had already entered — at 2019 prices, while adoption was still running at 2017 rates.

Betancourt did not describe his AI investment as a technology thesis. He described it as a cycle thesis — the same framework he has applied to mobility licensing, energy infrastructure, and consumer brands throughout his career.

His stated approach is to identify where the chain of value is moving in a given industry, position capital at the new bottleneck before the market confirms the shift, and hold through the period when most participants remain uncertain. AI, in his reading, was the next bottleneck in the broader technology economy — a tool that would make every existing industry more efficient, regardless of sector.

“What is AI?” he recently asked. “It’s a machine that thinks faster and finds solution faster. So AI just makes everything more efficient. So it’s not only in energy. In anything.”

That framing strips the investment of its mystique. Betancourt was not predicting which AI models would win or which applications would dominate. He was predicting that efficiency-enhancing technology, once it crossed a capability threshold, would draw massive capital deployment — and that early holders of well-positioned companies would benefit from that deployment. According to the Stanford HAI 2025 AI Index, total corporate AI investment reached $252.3 billion in 2024, with private funding alone rising 44.5% year over year. Those numbers represent the wave Betancourt was already inside when the broader market arrived.

The return Betancourt described is a data point, not a boast. He was careful to frame it modestly — “I think I got lucky” — while also acknowledging the underlying logic that made the bet coherent. Both things can be true: a position can be well-reasoned and still require favorable timing to produce outsized returns.

What the 20x figure confirms is that his entry point was early enough to capture the bulk of the valuation expansion. According to the Stanford HAI 2025 AI Index, the number of newly funded generative AI companies roughly tripled in 2024 alone. A position built before that acceleration would have benefited from each successive wave of capital entering the category.

This outcome is consistent with how Alejandro Betancourt López has described his broader approach. His framework is not about picking the winning technology — it is about identifying which asset class becomes scarce or newly valuable as a broader market shift unfolds, and entering before that scarcity is priced in.

Betancourt indicated that the portfolio is continuing to build exposure in AI and adjacent sectors. He named artificial intelligence, robotics, and technology manufacturing as the primary areas of concentration for O’Hara Administration going forward.

According to the O’Hara Administration profile, the group’s investment mandate includes private equity, venture capital, and technology — structured to allow early entries into categories that traditional institutional investors approach cautiously. That structure enabled the original AI bet in the first place. The more instructive question his disclosures raise for other investors is not which company he backed. It is what he was reading in 2019 or 2020 that the broader market was not — and whether that same signal is visible somewhere else today.

What AI investment did Alejandro Betancourt López make before the boom? Betancourt disclosed that he made a large AI investment approximately five years earlier, placing his entry at around 2019 or 2020. He described it as a “big ticket” position that had grown to roughly 20 times its original value by early 2025. He declined to name the company due to confidentiality agreements.

How did Betancourt’s AI investment timing compare to the broader market? His entry preceded the generative AI investment surge by several years. According to the Stanford HAI 2024 AI Index Report, generative AI funding reached $25.2 billion in 2023 — nearly eight times its prior year level. Betancourt had already built his position before that expansion began.

What was Betancourt’s reasoning for investing in AI early? He did not frame the investment as a technology bet. He described AI as a tool that makes every industry more efficient and identified that category as the next major concentration point in the chain of value across sectors. His investment logic followed the same pattern he has applied in energy, mobility, and consumer goods.

What is O’Hara Administration? O’Hara Administration is the international investment group led by Alejandro Betancourt López. It has operated as a family office since 2014, with a mandate spanning private equity, venture capital, and technology investments across multiple sectors and geographies.

How large is AI investment today compared to when Betancourt entered? Total corporate AI investment reached $252.3 billion in 2024, according to the Stanford HAI 2025 AI Index, with private investment rising 44.5% year over year. U.S. private AI investment alone reached $109 billion that year — figures that represent a market dramatically larger than the one Betancourt entered.

Originally published at https://www.investmentguide.co.uk on March 13, 2026.

Stories of businesses rebounding after the COVID-19 pandemic are commonplace. Much rarer is how a company managed to grow during the lockdowns. But that’s precisely what sunglasses company Hawkers managed to do under the leadership of Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López.

Aside from the supply chain issues that plagued every industry, Hawkers faced a different kind of challenge that became apparent during the earliest days of the worldwide crisis.

After years of strategically leveraging social media marketing to sell its fashionable and affordable sunglasses, Hawkers was making serious inroads with consumers. The company had a healthy net worth, and its business was expanding from its home in Spain to countries across Europe and the Americas.

However, the hyper-competitive sunglasses industry is hard to break into. For decades, Luxottica has held a virtual monopoly in the sector. Because it owns more than 80% of brands, including major players such as Oakley, Ray-Ban, Costa Del Mar, and more, its dominance in the industry makes it difficult for independent companies to compete.

So when the respiratory virus swept the globe, it came at a particularly vulnerable time for Hawkers.

“The pandemic was a big problem for us, as for many other companies,” Hawkers President Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López said. “It was a big challenge. We had to adapt [because] not many people were going outdoors and needing sunglasses.”

Suddenly, the company faced an existential threat. How does a sunglasses company cater to consumers who don’t need sunglasses? It could have increased its advertising budget and hoped to maintain a presence in consumers’ minds that would last longer than the pandemic. It could have halted production and fired employees, hoping to survive the market downturn by slashing overhead costs.

Or, as Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López decided, the company could pivot to a different product that could satisfy new consumer demands.

For Hawkers, that meant bolstering its nonsunglasses product lines and providing consumers with a new fashionable accessory.

Or, as he put it: “We focused more on developing the eyewear part of it, and we tried to keep the revenue of the company, which was a big challenge, trying to develop new products that would adapt to people not going outdoors, and using eyewear for their computers, and stay more at home.”

Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López: Staying Ahead of the New Normal

The transition from an outdoor, leisure-oriented product line to one that catered to customers who wanted fashionable eyewear for Zoom meetings, virtual classrooms, and over-the-mask grocery shopping was a massive shift for Hawkers. But it wasn’t far from business as usual for Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López.

As a graduate of Boston’s Suffolk University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration, he was trained to understand the complexities of shifting marketplaces. Since his time in college, Betancourt López has worked across many industries and helped a vast array of companies grow into financial maturity or find footholds in new marketplaces. With a net worth north of $2.6 billion, he’s been successful at navigating businesses through transitions and finding competitive advantages.

So, although the COVID-19 pandemic created new challenges for Hawkers, responding to crises was familiar territory for its president.

He explained his approach simply: “I believe that you have to understand that the world is changing so fast,” he said. “The markets, the appetites, the cultures — everything changes.”

The decision to focus on nonsunglasses eyewear seems obvious in retrospect, but during the wild and unsure early days of the pandemic, nothing felt assured. Even with the pivot, there was no guarantee that consumers would spend their discretionary income on eyewear. But Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López believed he could find a market.

And that’s exactly what he did.

A Better View

The pandemic brought major upheaval to consumer’s lives and behaviors. But while many people reduced the amount of money they spent on sunglasses during the lockdown period, they increased spending in other areas, such as tools for personal health and growth.

That was where Hawkers positioned its nonsunglasses lines of eyewear. The company introduced lines of fashionable eyewear that mimicked its sunglasses’ promise of trendiness without high price tags. Alongside traditional glasses, the company launched a line of nonprescription lenses made with blue blocking technology that filters out certain harmful wavelengths, usually emitted by screens, that can cause eye strain and fatigue.

Paired with more of Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López’s strategic social media marketing, the results of Hawkers’ new lines were encouraging. Quickly, consumers latched on to the idea of buying inexpensive, high-quality fashion accessories that could be seen over internet video chats while simultaneously protecting their vision against increased screen time.

Since then, the nonsunglasses eyewear products at Hawkers have only grown, proving the savviness of pivoting to meet new consumer demands during a pandemic is a smart strategy.

“We are breaking records every week on our growth and our revenues,” he said. “That means that not only is the brand stronger than ever but there’s a big demand and appetite for our consumers and customers to get our products.”

Originally published at https://nativenewsonline.net.

Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López treats optimism not as a personality trait but as a functional operating principle — one that has shaped specific decisions across Hawkers Sunglasses, Auro Travel, and a long-horizon AI investment now valued at roughly 20 times its original cost.

Why Pessimism Is Functionally Incompatible With Entrepreneurship

Most investor frameworks are built around stress-testing what could go wrong. Betancourt López does not reject that discipline. What he rejects is the underlying mental posture of expecting failure.

“I’m very optimistic, always, and I think that’s one of the key to success,” Betancourt Lopez recently revealed. “If you’re pessimistic, it’s going to rain. If you’re optimistic, you’re going to see the sun. I don’t know how, or energies or religion or what’s that fifth element that makes it, but it happens.”

He pressed the point further: “If you visualize you’re going to see the sun, you’re going to see the sun. If you want rain to come, you’re going to attract it.”

For Betancourt López, that isn’t an abstract philosophy. It is the lens through which he evaluates whether a business idea is worth backing, whether a struggling company is worth saving, and whether an early-stage technology is worth a large, patient bet.

Research on this dynamic is well-established. Entrepreneurs who attribute setbacks to external or temporary factors — rather than fixed personal limitations — demonstrate greater persistence and are more likely to build durable companies over time. Betancourt López arrived at a similar conclusion through two decades of results across four industries.

How Did Visualization Shape His Earliest Business Instincts?

Long before he had a portfolio of companies, Betancourt López had the habit of projecting himself forward into outcomes he hadn’t yet reached. He describes it plainly.

“I always was daydreaming about being somebody more important or achieving higher goals,” he said in a recent interview. “Everybody thought I was losing my time or wasting or being irrelevant.”

He continued: “That’s what motivates you, and you daydream about that all day. Once you start believing in it, it becomes reality without you noticing it.”

That orientation carried directly into his professional approach. His message on the Principal Post, when asked what he wants the world to hear, was spare and direct: “Always look forward. Never consider stopping or quitting.”

For Betancourt López, a forward-looking posture isn’t separate from financial discipline — it’s the condition that makes sustained discipline possible.

Optimism as a Decision Filter: The Hawkers Case

When Betancourt López first evaluated Hawkers in 2016, the company was not profitable and lacked the capital to maintain production at scale. A risk-first reader of that situation would have passed.

Betancourt López saw something different: a brand selling quality sunglasses for $20 to $40 in a market dominated by names charging $200 a pair, operating through a social media-first distribution model that had barely been exploited. O’Hara Financial committed roughly €50 million, and Betancourt López assumed the presidency of the company weeks later.

Within a few years, Hawkers had distributed more than 4.5 million pairs of eyewear across more than 50 countries — a reach that had looked implausible at the point of entry.

He has been explicit that this brand of optimism does not mean ignoring downside risk. “You’ve got to be optimistic,” he said. “It’s your job to support that [entrepreneur], but with a realistic view. You’ve got to bet on it; you’ve got to believe in it — but always with two feet on the ground.”

The full passage draws a hard line: “Because if you pass the border from the realistic world to a fantasy world, that’s where you get lost, and you can destroy your company and your project. Every entrepreneur has to dream big — but it has to have a route to success. It has to be doable.”

That distinction — between grounded forward-belief and uncritical enthusiasm — is the core of his model. The Hawkers result bore it out.

Auro Travel, AI, and the Pattern Behind the Portfolio

The same forward-leaning framework shows up in two other chapters of Betancourt López’s career, each requiring conviction before confirmation.

With Auro Travel, the thesis was that ride-sharing licenses in Spain were dramatically underpriced relative to their future value. Betancourt López and his partners began accumulating them from operators who saw them as minor supplementary assets. “People were selling this license for nothing,” he explained, “because they were like a complement to the taxi drivers that they see at the time, no purpose for it.”

Uber’s eventual acquisition of the business validated the position. The bet had required an optimistic read of a regulatory environment most were discounting.

His AI commitment followed a parallel logic. Betancourt López disclosed that he made a significant investment in an AI company approximately five years before the sector’s commercial explosion captured mainstream investor attention. He was careful not to overstate his foresight. “I got lucky,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you I’m a visionary that I thought… But I thought it was a great idea. I did a big ticket on it and now it’s 20 times its investment.”

The qualifier is important. Betancourt López does not claim perfect prediction. He claims a willingness to act on a well-reasoned positive thesis when others remain undecided — which is, in practice, what optimism as a capital allocation principle produces.

What Betancourt López’s Track Record Says About Losing

Betancourt López is also direct about the fact that his record is not perfect. Losses happen. What he describes is not immunity to failure — it is a refusal to let failure recalibrate his baseline orientation.

“I have a good batting average,” he said. “If you take a baseball example, I hit more home runs than I strike out. I’m very proud of that, that I don’t swing for first base. I always swing for a home run, and I do strike out and that’s a human thing, nobody gets everything perfect.”

That framing — accepting strikeouts as a structural feature of high-conviction bets rather than evidence of a broken method — is a defining characteristic of Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López’s approach across every sector he has entered.

Across Hawkers, Auro, and an AI position now worth multiples of its initial cost, the most consistent thread is not industry expertise or geographic focus. It is the refusal to let pessimism set the terms.

Originally published at https://www.newsanyway.com on March 3, 2026.

Alejandro Betancourt Lopez embodies the modern global entrepreneur, successfully translating insights from his Venezuelan upbringing into international business leadership that spans continents and industries. His journey demonstrates how emerging-market origins can confer competitive advantages in building global ventures when combined with global education and strategic vision.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1980, Alejandro Betancourt Lopez grew up immersed in an economy dominated by oil revenues and characterized by significant volatility. This environment provided early exposure to commodity cycles, currency fluctuations, and the economic challenges facing resource-dependent nations. Rather than viewing these experiences as limitations, he transformed them into sources of competitive intelligence that would inform his later investment strategies across diverse markets.

The decision by Alejandro Betancourt Lopez to pursue international education at Suffolk University in Massachusetts proved transformative in developing his global perspective. His double major in Economics and Business Administration provided analytical frameworks for understanding market dynamics while exposing him to American business practices and international student perspectives. This cross-cultural education created a unique worldview that combines emerging-market pragmatism with developed-economy sophistication.

Early professional experience in Venezuela’s petroleum industry provided Alejandro Betancourt Lopez with foundational skills in managing complex operations and navigating international markets. Working for a global petroleum producer and trader, he specialized in exploration, production, and trading of oil derivatives. This experience taught crucial lessons in risk management, international negotiations, and operational excellence that would prove transferable to entirely different industries. His entrepreneurial journey details how these early experiences shaped his business philosophy.

The transition from Venezuelan energy professional to international entrepreneur began with his recognition that skills developed in one industry could be successfully applied to others. Alejandro Betancourt Lopez leveraged his understanding of global supply chains, regulatory complexity, and currency risks to identify opportunities in European fashion and African finance. His ability to identify cross-industry and cross-geographic connections became a defining characteristic of his investment approach.

His landmark investment in Hawkers marked the beginning of Alejandro Betancourt Lopez’s transformation into an international business leader. The 50 million euro investment and subsequent role as president of the Spanish sunglasses company demonstrated his ability to identify and execute digital transformation opportunities in traditional industries. Under his leadership, Hawkers grew from a startup to a global brand through innovative social media marketing and direct-to-consumer strategies. This success provided both capital and credibility for further international expansion. His business empire development chronicles this pivotal investment.

During the O’Hara Administration, Alejandro Betancourt Lopez has continued to expand his international presence across multiple sectors. His investment in BDK Financial Group represents a strategic bet on financial inclusion in French-speaking Africa, addressing unmet market needs while building sustainable businesses. The transportation investment in Auro Travel demonstrates its ability to identify disruption opportunities in European markets. Each venture builds upon lessons learned from previous experiences while addressing new geographic and industry challenges.

The international business leadership demonstrated by Alejandro Betancourt Lopez extends beyond financial investment to active operational engagement. He doesn’t simply provide capital; he actively participates in transforming and scaling ventures across diverse cultural and regulatory environments. This hands-on approach, combined with his multicultural background and global education, enables him to effectively bridge diverse business contexts. His comprehensive professional profile showcases the breadth of his international activities.

Today, Alejandro Betancourt Lopez serves as an inspiration to emerging-market entrepreneurs seeking to build international businesses. His journey from Venezuelan roots to global leadership proves that geographic origin need not limit entrepreneurial ambition. Success requires vision, education, adaptability, and the courage to apply diverse experiences to new challenges. His story demonstrates that emerging market insights can provide competitive advantages in global business when properly leveraged and combined with an international perspective and operational excellence.

Originally published at https://thelibertarianrepublic.com on February 13, 2026.

The International Network That Helped Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez Build His $2.6 Billion Fortune

Few entrepreneurs can claim to have built a multi-billion dollar portfolio by weaving together relationships across three continents. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, the investor and president of Hawkers sunglasses, has done exactly that. His fortune, currently estimated at $2.6 billion, rests not on a single stroke of genius but on decades of carefully cultivated partnerships stretching from Boston to London to Dakar.

What separates Betancourt Lopez from other wealthy investors is his approach to collaboration. Rather than competing head-to-head with rivals or acquiring companies outright, he has repeatedly found ways to transform potential adversaries into allies. He has built what might be called an “ecosystem advantage”-a network of contacts, co-investors, and partners that makes each subsequent deal easier than the last.

From Caracas to Boston to London

Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez’s international trajectory began early. Born in Caracas in 1980, he left South America as a young man to attend Suffolk University in Massachusetts, where he completed a double major in Economics and Business Administration. He later added an Executive MBA from Oxford University in England. This academic path gave him more than credentials; it gave him a transatlantic network of classmates and professors who would later become business contacts.

“I grew up in an environment where everybody had what you needed, but I always wanted to be able to do something on my own,” Betancourt Lopez explained in a 2025 interview.

That drive took him from academic theory to hands-on experience in the energy sector. His early career included positions at ICC-OEOC, a petroleum company with operations spanning the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, where he served as Director of Commerce for Latin America and executive trader in the United Kingdom. At each stop, he collected contacts and learned how to operate across jurisdictions with different regulatory frameworks and business cultures.

The geographical diversity of his early work proved essential. Unlike entrepreneurs who master a single market before expanding, Betancourt Lopez was operating internationally from nearly the start of his career. He understood currency fluctuations, cross-border regulations, and the subtle differences in how deals get done in London versus Boston.

Converting Competitors Into Collaborators

The clearest example of Betancourt Lopez’s collaborative approach came in 2016, when he entered the Spanish eyewear market. Hawkers, a sunglasses startup founded by four friends with just $300 in 2013, had grown quickly but was struggling with operational challenges and needed outside capital to scale.

Rather than swooping in alone, Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez assembled a coalition. He partnered with Félix Ruiz and Hugo Arévalo, the founders of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking app that had been acquired by Telefónica. Together, they led a €50 million financing round-one of the largest startup investments in Spain at the time. Arévalo joined as Executive Chairman while Betancourt Lopez became President, creating a leadership structure that combined his capital and operational experience with the tech founders’ digital expertise.

The partnership worked because each party brought something the others lacked. Ruiz and Arévalo understood social media marketing and the Spanish tech ecosystem. Betancourt Lopez contributed international connections and experience scaling businesses across borders. The original Hawkers founders-Alex and David Moreno, Pablo Sánchez, and Iñaki Soriano-retained operational knowledge and creative direction.

This pattern repeated itself in the transportation sector. When Betancourt Lopez co-founded Auro Travel, a ride-hailing service in Spain, he anticipated that global players like Uber would eventually enter the market. Rather than positioning Auro as a direct competitor destined for a bruising fight, he accumulated vehicle-for-hire licenses during a period when they were undervalued.

“We knew that the market was going to shift to private riding industry instead of taxis,” he explained. “We started accumulating the licenses. It was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble.”

The approach paid off. Auro built infrastructure and trained drivers, creating what Betancourt Lopez describes as an ecosystem around the service providers. When Uber and Cabify eventually sought to expand their Spanish operations, they found Auro holding assets they needed. By late 2022, both companies had reportedly made acquisition bids of approximately €200 million for Auro-a demonstration of how positioning a company as a potential partner rather than a target for destruction can yield substantial returns.

Building Ecosystem Advantages Across Continents

The network Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez has constructed extends well beyond Europe. Through O’Hara Administration, the international investment group he founded in 2014, he has deployed capital into African banking, Latin American energy, and technology startups across multiple continents.

One of his more ambitious moves came in 2015, when BDK Financial Group, of which Betancourt Lopez is a major shareholder, launched Banque de Dakar in Senegal. The objective was to provide banking services to French-speaking African nations within the West African Economic and Monetary Union. To establish credibility quickly, he recruited Alfredo Sáenz, the former CEO of Banco Santander, as the bank’s president in 2016. The bank has since expanded operations into Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali.

His philosophy centers on identifying where value will accumulate before others recognize the opportunity. He describes this as understanding where the “chain of value” is moving-a concept he illustrates with historical examples.

“If you can talk about the oil industry, at the beginning, the refiners, when the Rockefellers were in the business, were the ones making the profit,” he explained. “Then oil became a scarcity, and then the value was in the producer of the oil more than the refineries. Then shipping, when war came in the ’40s, who had the means of transporting goods-that’s how Onassis made his fortune because he had all the ships.”

Applying this framework requires relationships in multiple markets simultaneously. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez maintains that surrounding yourself with talented people who possess specialized knowledge is essential.

“I consider myself a very fast learner,” he has said. “I understand the basics of not everything in the world but of my investments. And I surround myself with good talent and people that I think can run it efficiently and I can understand what they’re doing.”

That approach captures something important about his method. Betancourt Lopez does not attempt to master every industry he enters. Instead, he identifies skilled operators, provides them with capital and connections, and focuses on positioning the overall portfolio for maximum advantage. With investments spanning eyewear, transportation, banking, and energy, his $2.6 billion fortune reflects not just shrewd individual bets but the compound returns of a network built across decades and continents.

Originally published at https://www.siliconindia.com.

Long before Alejandro Betancourt López built a portfolio spanning eyewear, ride-sharing, and energy investments, he was a young man in South America with a habit that irritated the people around him. He spent hours thinking about things that hadn’t happened yet-picturing himself somewhere else, doing something bigger, becoming someone more significant than his circumstances suggested was possible.

“I always was daydreaming about being somebody more important or achieving higher goals,” Betancourt López recalled. “Everybody thought I was losing my time or wasting or being irrelevant, and I was always sure that I was going to get somewhere else.”

That tendency toward mental projection, which others dismissed as distraction, became a cornerstone of his approach to business and investment. What skeptics saw as idle fantasy, Betancourt López experienced as rehearsal-a way of preparing his mind for outcomes that seemed improbable at the time but eventually materialized.

Research supports the notion that visualization affects goal achievement. According to a study by Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University, people who write down and visualize their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them than those who simply think about what they want. Another survey found that 59% of people who visualize their goals report feeling more confident and are more likely to accomplish what they set out to do.

Alejandro Betancourt López discovered this principle through lived experience rather than academic study. Growing up among wealthy families, he watched peers who had inherited money and status take their positions for granted. Many of them, he noticed, lacked the hunger that comes from wanting something you don’t yet possess. They couldn’t picture a future different from their present because their present already felt sufficient.

“And what is funny, that all those people that took things for granted, later on, they just didn’t have that… They were not hungry for success,” Betancourt López observed.

His own hunger expressed itself through visualization. He pictured himself traveling to Europe, building businesses, operating on a global stage. These weren’t fleeting thoughts but persistent mental exercises that shaped his expectations and, eventually, his decisions.

“Once you start believing in it, it becomes reality without you noticing it,” he said.

The psychology of optimism

Neuroscience offers some explanation for why this technique works. Brain imaging research shows that vividly picturing an experience activates many of the same neural networks as actually living through it. When someone repeatedly envisions a successful outcome, they strengthen the neural pathways associated with that scenario-a form of mental rehearsal that makes the envisioned future feel more familiar and attainable.

Alejandro Betancourt López frames the concept in simpler terms. For him, the connection between mindset and outcomes isn’t theoretical but observable. He has watched optimistic people attract opportunities while pessimistic ones repel them, and he has experienced the phenomenon in his own career.

“I’m very optimistic, always, and I think that’s one of the keys to success,” he said. “If you’re pessimistic, it’s going to rain. If you’re optimistic, you’re going to see the sun. I don’t know how, or energies or religion or what’s that fifth element that makes it, but it happens. I’m telling you, if you visualize you’re going to see the sun, you’re going to see the sun. If you want rain to come, you’re going to attract it.”

This philosophy doesn’t mean ignoring reality or pretending challenges don’t exist. Betancourt López distinguishes between productive visualization and empty fantasy. Daydreaming about success serves a purpose only when it fuels action rather than replacing it. The mental picture has to connect to concrete steps, specific decisions, and sustained effort.

His approach at Hawkers, the Spanish eyewear company where he serves as president, illustrates this balance. When Alejandro Betancourt López invested in the startup and took over its leadership in 2016, he could envision what the brand might become-a global competitor to established names like Ray-Ban. But that vision required execution: expanding manufacturing capabilities, building retail presence across multiple countries, and refining the company’s digital marketing approach.

The same pattern repeated with Auro Travel, the ride-sharing venture he backed in Spain. Betancourt López anticipated that the market would shift toward private vehicle services before major competitors fully entered the Spanish market. He accumulated licenses while others saw little value in them, betting on a future that existed only in his mind at the time.

“It was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble because we knew that the market was going to shift to the private riding industry instead of taxis,” he explained.

From daydream to discipline

What separates productive visualization from wishful thinking? For Alejandro Betancourt López, the distinction lies in coupling mental pictures with relentless execution. The daydream provides direction; discipline provides momentum.

“Once I start something, I just don’t stop,” he said. “I try to see every single option that could turn negative and try to mitigate it beforehand. Even if the idea is great and you have the right people, it’ll always surprise you with things that are not expected. You’ve got to be there to make sure you push through.”

His investment philosophy reflects this dual emphasis. Betancourt López describes himself as someone who swings for home runs rather than settling for base hits- a high-risk approach that requires both the confidence to commit and the work ethic to follow through.

“I hit more home runs than I strike out,” he noted. “I’m very proud of that, that I don’t swing for first base. I always swing for a home run, and I do strike out and that’s a human thing, nobody gets everything perfect, but I have a good batting average.”

That batting average didn’t emerge from visualization alone. Alejandro Betancourt López pairs his optimistic mindset with an almost obsessive attention to operational details. He surrounds himself with talented people, studies industries before entering them, and maintains involvement in his companies long after the initial investment closes.

The combination matters. Research on visualization suggests that picturing outcomes works best when paired with process-focused mental rehearsal-envisioning not just the destination but the steps required to reach it. Athletes who visualize their training routines alongside their victories outperform those who only picture winning.

Betancourt López arrived at a similar insight through practice rather than theory. His early daydreams about success evolved into a systematic approach: identify where markets are heading, position investments accordingly, and execute with intensity.

“The edge you have is because you have that passion,” he explained. “That’s the advantage. It’s not how smarter you are than most people, it’s about how much dedicated you are and how sure you are you’re going to achieve that. And that puts you in front of everybody else because it’s time. They unconsciously dedicate more time to it than anybody else, because you can’t stop thinking about it.”

For Alejandro Betancourt López, the daydreaming never really stopped-it simply matured into something more actionable. What began as a young man picturing himself beyond his circumstances became a billionaire investor still envisioning where markets will move next, still betting on futures that others cannot yet see.

Originally published at https://cyprus-mail.com on February 2, 2026.

Wall Street loves technology companies. Software firms routinely command valuations of 10, 15, even 20 times their annual revenue. The logic seems straightforward: once built, software can scale infinitely with minimal marginal cost, and customers tend to stick around year after year through subscriptions and integrations. Fashion companies face a different reality entirely.

Alejandro Betancourt López, president of Spanish eyewear brand Hawkers , has spent nearly a decade wrestling with the financial dynamics that make consumer fashion one of the most challenging sectors for investors. His conclusion is blunt: fashion demands relentless effort just to stay in place, and markets price that difficulty into valuations. “Hardest one is fashion,” Betancourt López said. “Fashion brands are valued at very low multiple levels because you don’t know for how long they’re going to be sustainable.”

The Sustainability Problem No One Talks About

When Alejandro Betancourt López discusses sustainability, he isn’t referring to environmental practices or ethical sourcing. He means something more fundamental: whether a brand can maintain its relevance and revenue over time. This distinction matters because profitability and sustainability operate on different timescales-and fashion struggles with both.

“Sustainability and profitability are two different things,” Betancourt López explained . “If profitable tomorrow, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to be profitable forever. I think profitability is tough, but is something easier to achieve than sustainability, because in any industry, it’s very hard to predict where the market is shifting.”

Recent data confirms this assessment. According to industry analysis, fashion and apparel companies trade at median EBITDA multiples of roughly 9–10x, while high-growth software companies often command multiples several times higher. The gap reflects investor skepticism about fashion’s long-term predictability.

The problem intensifies for brands selling discretionary items like sunglasses. Unlike software subscriptions that auto-renew or consumer staples that people purchase habitually, fashion products require active persuasion with every transaction. Alejandro Betancourt López describes the grind in stark terms.

“You have to convince everybody, all the market, everybody in the market, to buy a pair of sunglasses every day and put a lot of marketing and wake up the next day and do the same all over and all over and all over,” he said. “So it’s a very, very, very hard sustainable company to keep it sustainable over time.”

Reinvention as a Business Model

Hawkers launched in 2013 when four Spanish entrepreneurs pooled roughly $300 to sell sunglasses online. The company caught fire through aggressive Facebook advertising during an era when digital ad costs remained low, scaling from that modest start to €70 million in annual revenue by 2016. That October, Hawkers raised €50 million in its first external financing round, and the following month appointed Alejandro Betancourt López as president.

The honeymoon didn’t last. As competitors flooded digital advertising channels, the cost of acquiring customers through Facebook and Instagram skyrocketed. The arbitrage that had fueled Hawkers’ early growth disappeared. What worked brilliantly in 2014 became economically unviable by 2018.

Betancourt López recognized that survival required perpetual adaptation. “You have to use all the tools you have in marketing, creativity, reinvent yourself constantly,” he said. “It’s a matter of being able to adapt constantly or in the long term or in the medium term.”

Under his leadership, Hawkers pivoted from a purely digital operation to an omnichannel retailer. The company opened physical stores across Spain and Portugal-approximately 70 locations by 2023-and launched wholesale distribution in over 30 markets. Mexico became particularly important, growing to represent 35–40% of total sales, partly through sponsorship deals with Formula 1 drivers.

The transformation required more than new sales channels. Hawkers also brought manufacturing in-house, building its own production facility starting in early 2021 to reduce dependence on Chinese suppliers and improve quality control. The company invested in high-end Italian machinery for injection molding-equipment costing up to €80,000 per mold compared to roughly $10,000 for Chinese alternatives.

The Price Sensitivity Trap

Fashion brands face another challenge that technology companies largely avoid: customers notice price increases immediately and often refuse to pay them. Alejandro Betancourt López has watched this dynamic play out during economic downturns.

“The elasticity of pricing, it’s something that consumers, when it’s a downturn economy, sometimes they lose money just not to lose market share, and that’s to achieve sustainability in the future,” he explained. “But at the same time, you’re eating your insides out and you don’t know how long you’re going to be able to sustain that.”

This creates a brutal equilibrium. Raise prices too aggressively, and customers defect to competitors. Hold prices steady during inflationary periods, and margins compress. Neither path leads anywhere comfortable.

“The equilibrium is very hard and very difficult,” Betancourt López acknowledged.

Competing When Everyone Copies Your Playbook

The digital marketing tactics that propelled Hawkers’ rise have become industry standard. Every eyewear startup now runs Instagram campaigns and partners with influencers. The playbook that once provided differentiation now serves as table stakes.

Alejandro Betancourt López watched the margin shift in real time. “Now it gets tougher. Sustainability, now prices, everybody’s doing the same thing. So everybody goes to do the same thing, price goes through the roof, and the big winners are the social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, they’re making the money right now,” he said. “The margins are shifted in the chain of value, to somewhere else.”

This observation echoes a pattern Betancourt López has studied across industries. Value migrates along supply chains over time , concentrating in whichever segment holds the most leverage. For decades, fashion brands captured healthy margins by controlling distribution and cultivating brand mystique. Digital platforms have disrupted that model, inserting themselves between brands and customers while extracting tolls for access.

Hawkers responded by reducing its dependence on paid digital advertising. “You have to reinvent yourself, create and evolve into a different kind of company that doesn’t depend on social media or paid media marketing,” Betancourt López explained. The company’s expansion into physical retail, wholesale partnerships, and owned manufacturing all serve this goal-building assets and relationships that competitors cannot easily replicate.

Staying Above Water

Fashion’s combination of fickle consumer preferences, low switching costs, and intense competition creates a sector where few brands endure. Alejandro Betancourt López frames the challenge with characteristic directness.

“Nobody has a perfect upper line. People do get downturns and then get up and do better, or people don’t get up and do better. It’s really, really, really hard,” he said. “It’s a very competitive market, and sustainability is something that you have to be on top of your game all the time to make sure in any industry, that your head is above water.”

Hawkers has managed to keep its head above water longer than most. The company now operates in more than 50 countries, employs over 500 people, and generates approximately $100 million in annual sales . Those numbers represent genuine achievement in a sector littered with failed brands and broken promises.

Whether Hawkers can sustain that performance for another decade remains uncertain-Betancourt López would be the first to acknowledge as much. Fashion offers no guarantees, only the opportunity to compete again tomorrow.

Originally published at https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com on January 26, 2026.