On 5 November 2026 it will be 100 years since the birth of Andrónico Luksic Abaroa, the founder of Chile’s Luksic Group. He started with a stake in a car dealership in a desert port. In 2005, the year he died, Forbes called him Chile’s richest man, worth $4.2 billion. Today his widow, Iris Fontbona, and his children control a London-listed copper miner and a Chilean conglomerate behind Banco de Chile and the brewer CCU.
For families, the most useful part of the story is not the lucky first deal. It is the structure he left behind: two holding companies side by side, one for mining and one for finance and industry.
A trader’s start
His father, Policarpo Luksic, was a Croatian immigrant who arrived in Chile in 1910 and settled in Antofagasta, a port in the northern desert. According to The Baltimore Sun’s 2005 death notice, Andrónico grew up there, where his father owned a general store. Sources disagree on his birthplace: Antofagasta or Calama, a mining town inland.
He studied law in Santiago without finishing, then went to Paris after the Second World War. The International Directory of Company Histories says he traded on the currency market there and raised enough to buy 10% of the Ford dealership in Antofagasta, which he later took over. Forbes’s 2005 profile says he started with a single Ford dealership in 1950. Spanish-language Wikipedia puts his Paris savings at $30,000; we could not confirm that figure in a stronger source.
The mine he sold for dollars
In the early 1950s Luksic bought into a small copper mine owned by French partners, a quarter or a third of it depending on the account, and soon held most or all of it. Spanish-language sources name it Portezuelo. In 1954 he sold it to Nippon Mining of Japan for $500,000, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The story he liked to tell: he had named his price in pesos, the Japanese understood dollars, and he was too embarrassed to correct them. “I thought for sure they would figure it out,” he told El Mercurio in 2002, as the Sun reported. One company history calls the tale a legend and names the buyer as Nippon Steel. Either way, the sale gave him his first real capital.
Buying a British railway company
In 1957 he created Forestal Quiñenco, a forestry company whose name lives on in today’s Quiñenco, according to its own history. In the 1960s and 1970s the group spread into copper processing, power, manufacturing, transport, farming and food, and into Argentina, Colombia and Brazil. In the 1980s it added banking, telecoms, hotels and drinks, including the brewer CCU, bought together with Germany’s Schörghuber group.
The decisive purchase came in 1979, when the Luksic Group took control of The Antofagasta (Chili) and Bolivia Railway Company. It had been incorporated in London in 1888 to build a line from Antofagasta to La Paz. Under Luksic it moved into mining, later took the name Antofagasta Holdings, and became Antofagasta plc in 1999. In 1986 it bought the rights to the Los Pelambres copper deposit from ARCO, and the mine started producing in 1999. Luksic chaired the company from 1982 until November 2004.
Two holdings, two jobs
By the mid-1990s the railway company held much more than copper. In 1996 the family drew a line. Antofagasta exchanged its financial and industrial interests for 33.6% of Quiñenco, which became the parent of everything that was not mining or railways. Quiñenco says the step opened the capital markets to it; in the 1990s it raised $279 million in New York and Santiago. In 2003 Antofagasta’s Quiñenco stake was demerged, so the two companies no longer owned each other.
In plain words:
- Mining: Antofagasta plc. Listed in London, it owns copper mines in Chile, including Los Pelambres and Centinela. According to La Tercera (January 2026), the family controls about 60.6% of it through two entities, Metalinvest Establishment and Kupferberg Establishment, both controlled by the Abaroa Foundation. (Abaroa was his mother’s surname.) Jean-Paul Luksic, who chairs Antofagasta, holds about 4.2% more through a separate foundation.
- Finance and industry: Quiñenco. Listed in Santiago, it controls about 51% of Banco de Chile together with Citigroup and about 66% of CCU together with Heineken, according to its website, plus shipping (CSAV), port services (SAAM) and fuel distribution (Enex). The Luksic Group controls 83% of Quiñenco.
Why split it this way? Copper prices and bank profits move for different reasons and attract different investors. Two holdings let each side be valued, financed and run on its own terms, while the family keeps control of both from above. Our post on holding structures explains the building blocks.
Handing over
Luksic left his executive roles in 2002, and his children took over. He died on 18 August 2005, aged 78. Andrónico Luksic Craig, a son from his first marriage, chaired Quiñenco from 2013 until December 2023. Jean-Paul, his son with Iris Fontbona, chairs Antofagasta. Another son, Guillermo, died in 2013; La Tercera reports that about 13% of Quiñenco is attributed to his estate, within the family’s 83%. On 13 October 2026, Forbes’s real-time estimate for Iris Fontbona and her family was $45.7 billion.
A fair caveat
Much of the early story comes from Luksic’s own interviews and from reference works that disagree on details: his birthplace, the size of his first mining stake, the name of the Japanese buyer. The pesos-and-dollars anecdote cannot be checked. Forbes’s figure moves with copper and share prices; it is a snapshot, not what any heir could sell for.
Five lessons to take away
- One deal starts a fortune; many decisions keep it. The 1954 sale was a beginning, not the dynasty.
- Buy vehicles, not only assets. An 1888 railway company became the home of the family’s mining business.
- Keep different risks in different holdings. Copper and banking sit in separate companies with separate investors.
- Untangle cross-holdings while you can. The 1996 swap and the 2003 demerger gave each side a clear owner.
- Hand over while you can still advise. Luksic left executive roles in 2002 but chaired Antofagasta until 2004.
Questions to bring to your advisors
Do our businesses with very different risks sit inside one company, and what happens to one if the other has a bad year? Does any of our companies own part of another in a way that blurs who controls what? Who would lead each holding if the founder stepped back tomorrow? These are questions to bring to your advisors, not advice.