Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes

Industry

Construction

Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes’s Summary

Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes was born in 1956, in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, the second child of Mario Cardoso Gomes, a director of the State Bank of Amazonas, and Derly Faria Gomes, who had given up studying law to be a mother and housewife. Precocious and energetic, Mario grew up in a middle-class home in what was then a rather provincial, torpid and remote state capital in equatorial northern Brazil in the center of the gigantic Amazon rain forest.

Mario was an avid and talented student from the start of his formal education, and was always restless for activity and challenge. In 1967, Manaus was designated a free trade zone by the Brazilian government and a package of attractive financial incentives was offered to certain industries to establish manufacturing operations there. Overnight the sleepy river-port city was transformed into a hustling and bustling boomtown which it remains to this day (in 2006, over US$20 billion worth of goods were manufactured there). A year later, 12 year-old Mario, sensing a golden opportunity and with the help of his father, started importing electric slide projectors and selling them to small retail stores in Manaus. He thereafter expanded his product line to include other small consumer electronics. Mario had discovered his vocational identity – a natural-born entrepreneur!

At 15, Mario participated in a student exchange program whereby he spent a year going to high school in Wyoming, Michigan, and U.S.A. Living with a host family he became acquainted with American culture and consolidated his English language skills. He loved it all, from pancakes to snow skiing (no such thing in tropical Amazonas) to TV sit-coms. He continues to stay in contact with surviving members of his host family and his best school buddy of the time, Mark Hartman, who, after high school, went on to West Point and is today a general in the U.S. Army.

Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

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• expertise requests
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