Roberto Rocca

Argentina's leading industrialist

Roberto Rocca, industrialist: born Milan February 1922; chairman, Techint 1978-2003; married 1945 Andreína Bassetti (two sons, and one son deceased); died Milan 10 June 2003.

Roberto Rocca was Argentina's leading industrialist, an iconic figure who symbolised the country's ambition to escape from over-reliance on agricultural exports and join the developed world. He built up the Techint organisation, founded by his father in Italy, into Argentina's biggest conglomerate, with an annual turnover of $8bn and operations in more than 30 countries.

Rocca was born in Milan in 1922, the son of a steel manufacturer, Agostino Rocca, who prospered under Mussolini in the 1930s. He studied mechanical engineering at university, graduating in 1945, after a spell in the Italian navy during the Second World War. In that same year, Agostino Rocca founded Techint in Milan, and moved its headquarters to Argentina a few years later.

By that time, Roberto had gone to the United States to take a doctorate in metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). When his father died in 1978, Roberto took over the reins of the expanding company. It already had two steel plants in Argentina, employing 15,000 people, and had established a presence as an engineering contractor in other parts of Latin America.

During the 1980s, Techint expanded rapidly in Argentina, under Rocca's leadership, securing public-works contracts from both civilian and military governments. Its Siderca steel mill in Campana became one of the world's largest producers of seamless steel piping for the oil and gas industry. At the same time, Techint became a leading contractor for energy-related industries, building pipelines, oil refineries, power-transmission lines and generating plants. Techint continued to grow in the 1990s, with the acquisition of other steel-tube manufacturers, from Mexico, Italy, Japan, Canada, Brazil and Venezuela.

In 2002, these various elements were combined into a new oil and gas services company, Tenaris, with Roberto Rocca as chairman of the board. Tenaris has eight steel-tube factories, two of them in Argentina, and controls more than 13 per cent of world output of these products. Rocca also moved into flat steel for the automobile and construction industries, buying the state company Somisa from the Argentine government, and renaming it Siderar. He also took control of Venezuela's main steel plant, Sidor.

Techint is now Argentina's largest holding company, employing more than 42,000 people. It has the capacity to produce almost 10 million tonnes of steel a year, and is involved in oil and gas production (through the Tecpetrol subsidiary) as well as construction projects all over Latin America, Italy, Nigeria, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Its biggest current contract is for the construction of two natural-gas pipelines in Peru, from the southern jungles over the Andes and down to Lima on the Pacific coast.

As well as being a tireless lobbyist for Argentine industry, Rocca was a patron of the arts and an accomplished watercolourist. He was noted for his austere life style and personal courage: in a country where public figures have often provided tempting targets for criminal gangs and armed political activists, Rocca refused to employ bodyguards.

Ill-health eventually forced him to retire from everyday management of Techint, handing control to his eldest son, Agostino, in 1993. Agostino was killed in an air crash in 2001, and his brother Paolo took over, but their father remained honorary chairman.

At his death, Roberto Rocca was listed in Forbes magazine as one of the 300 richest men in the world, with an estimated worth of some $1.6bn.

Colin Harding