History
Roberto Filgueira and Teresa Pereira children of European immigrants who lived through the war. Roberto went to work from a very young age with the responsibility and need to contribute to the family support. In this family, work builds identity and values, and this is transmitted through the generations. At the age of 30, Roberto learned the trade of buying and selling metals, and together with his wife Teresa, they started their first business in their home, in the La Teja neighborhood, in Montevideo, with great enthusiasm and almost no capital. That was the foundation stone of a Uruguayan enterprise that has been in the market for more than 50 years
Over the years, the business settled down, expanding and diversifying its clients. While Teresa attended to the business in the tile neighborhood, Roberto at the same time opened a new warehouse in a corner of the Aguada neighborhood. Then, in 1973, it moved to the new district of Paris, where the company is located to this day. I rent a small shed in a place shared with other enterprises: one for recycling rags and another dedicated to wicker. He bought and sold metals. Little by little, it acquired the adjoining sheds, and began to work with better logistics. Over time, it managed to provide the foundations with a greater amount of scrap and reach the 800 m² of infrastructure that the company currently has. On the day each of his sons, Edison and Robert turned 15, their father started them in the metal business. “He brought us into his project,” says Robert. At the plant, they had to learn all aspects of the trade. “We had to sweep the shed, load and unload, handle the shawls and forklifts, weigh, at that time we were a foundry and we learned to foundry. My father wanted that tomorrow we could run the company but knowing all the operations and the business”.Filme tal already went through various crises, but it stayed afloat. The metals market has become more complex, prices fluctuate a lot, and from the free import and export, the internal demand for non-ferrous metals fell a lot because the national industry (faucets,hardware, auto parts, industrial supplies, etc.) It was unable to compete with products imported from Argentina, Brazil and China. But crises also brought opportunities. After the recession of the year 2000, Filmetal changed its strategy, focusing on being a metal exporting company. It was a long-winded process: "When we were about to close the first export deal, a world crisis broke out and the dollar fell, forcing us to go back."
¨When the environmental authorizations appeared, we updated ourselves even more. We liked the challenge of positioning the company a few steps higher, with the vision of transforming ourselves from scrap metal to recycling. For that we incorporate a group of professionals, such as preventive technicians, environmental consultants, doctors, labor workers, lawyers, mechanical and chemical engineers, marketing technicians, architects, computer technicians and always the constant work of the administration team. Currently Filmetal S.A has more than 40 years of impeccable experience and continues to be guided by the same family and the same values that moved Roberto to start this legacy. Today we are in the third generation in the company. Today we are among the most important firms in the metal recycling industry in our country. Today and every day we do our work with enthusiasm and dedication, because that is how Roberto taught us, and because we know that the only way to do things is to do them well.
