Producir para el agro en un entorno turbulento. El caso de una fábrica de cosechadoras en la Argentina

Abstract

The production of rural machines in Argentina has its beginning very early, stimulated by the great opportunities that gave the cereal production. A remarkable trait of this sector is the tradition of technological innovation encouraged without any doubt by the specific nature of the agricultural production in our country and the high cost of the imported machinery. This tradition of innovation and the land tapestry will be the key to understand the development of a firm of harvest machines in the south of Santa Fe since the fifties. We can identify four moments in Roque Vassalli S.A.'s trajectory, each one is presented in this work in a chronological order that emphasises some aspect of the enterprises dynamic that explains the productive development and the financial-economic evolution of the firm in that period. On a first moment we will see the innovative disposition of the founder partner, his relationship with the public policies to promote the sector and the strong will to create a web of distributors; these are the key factors to the consolidation of this enterprise in the internal market. Instead, in a second place we emphasize the problems that it had in the agricultural machinery commerce on the second half of the seventies that ended up affecting its productive and financial situation. On the third part this work focalises on the variables that let us explain the recovery of the enterprise, mainly in the important dynamic of the internal market but also in the commercialization strategies and the capture of the wide external markets. Finally, the analysis on the fourth part remarks the thin limits that had the macroeconomic conjuncture over the entrepreneur negotiation, which ended up with the selling of the firm.