Engineering brothers Gabriel and Roberto Andrade founded Andrade Gutierrez with their friend Flavio Gutierrez, also an engineer, in Minas Gerais, a southwestern province of Brazil, in September 1948. Since building their first interstate highway from Rio De Janeiro to Belo Horizonte in the 1950s, each decade has seen them grow in line with the modernisation of Brazil and the rest of the developing world.
Presently, they have offices in 44 countries and more than 200,000 employees worldwide, delivering major engineering and construction projects in Brazil, Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
While the company’s holdings are split equally between the three families, Sergio Lin Andrade, the son of Roberto, is the current chairman and largest individual shareholder with 33 per cent. His personal wealth was rated by Forbes in 2015 to be $1.5 billion. According to credit rating service Moody’s, AG ended the twelve months to March 2018 with net revenue of 1.2 billion BRL (314.5 million USD). Based on its success over the years, AG has been able to move into telecommunications and splits itself into three divisions: engineering and construction, public projects, concession and utilities, and telecoms. In 2016, the company completed work on the stadium that was used for the Rio Olympic games, and many of its projects have become flagship pieces of infrastructure in the areas they operate in. Its first international contract was with the now Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) to build a 120-kilometre highway linking the cities of Epena, Impfondo and Dongou.
