The story
At the end of the 19th century, José Menéndez was a powerful landowner, colonizer, banker, industrialist and owner of a shipping company. His company's main trading post was set up in Punta Arenas, Chile, while also maintaining numerous establishments in Argentine territory.
In 1908, Menéndez, Mauricio Braun and Gastón Blanchard merged their respective companies and founded the Sociedad Anonima Importadora y Exportadora de la Patagonia (Import and Export Company of Patagonia), initially based in Punta Arenas, passing into Argentine jurisdiction in 1910.
By 1911 it was operating several stores in a warehouse format, while also having a naval fleet as well as regular passenger and cargo transportation lines between Buenos Aires and Punta Arenas, with stopovers in several Argentine Patagonia ports, through the use of two ships made to order in Britain: the Argentine and the Asturian.
In 1918 the company moved its headquarters from Punta Arenas into Argentina at the request of the Argentine government.
Mr. Menendez died in Buenos Aires in 1918, never having lost his Spanish nationality. At the time, the president of the company was his son-in-law, Mauricio Braun (of German and Prussian descent), who remained in this position until 1932, when he was replaced by Carlos Menéndez Behety.
By 1929 it had 25 branches in different locations within southern Argentina, in addition to 4 ships.
The Braun Menendez conglomerate worked in different areas, monopolizing much of the wool trade, meat packing industry and banking sector of Patagonia. Both families were part of the Sociedad Rural Argentina and together owned the Exploitation Company of Tierra del Fuego, having 430,000 hectares with 1,250,000 sheep that produced 5 million kilos of wool, as well as leather and meat. There they took part of the Selk'nam genocide.
Due to how long and complex the company name was, inhabitants of Patagonia simply called it "La Anónima" (literally, The Anonymous), and the name stuck. Between 1929 and 1968 La Anónima published the magazine La Argentina Austral, and also participated in the inauguration of the first radio programs in Comodoro Rivadavia and Río Gallegos. In 1942, the company opened its capital to public offering, trading in the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange since then.
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In 1957, La Anónima and other partners created the airline Austral Líneas Aéreas, which eventually became the second-largest commercial airline in the country after Aerolíneas Argentinas. The name Austral reflects the Patagonian identity of its owners.
In 1967 the company started selling off various assets, including ships, warehouses and numerous buildings. During the same year, several warehouses were converted to the supermarket format, the Trelew location being the first, and this transition was completed in 1971.
In the early 1980s, the stock package was again concentrated in the Braun family, who assumed the current leadership of the company and launched a new strategy aimed at gaining leadership in the retail industry of the Patagonia region through a policy of growth, adopting new technologies and establishing a new corporate identity. The company is known for being an early adopter of innovative retail technology such as barcodes, in the 1980s.
From Wikipedia’s article on La Anonima, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4