Interview with Mário Ferreira, Pluris Investments
Sofia Rainho
Boats are the true passion and the brand image of Mário Ferreira, a businessman from northern portugal. But the business of his Pluris Investments holding company goes much further. From hotels to helicopters, the real estate industry and tourist trains on the Tua Line through different sectors such as insurance, education or agriculture and technology. His most recent business and one of the most popular was the purchase of Media Capital and TVI.
Tua Rabelo
World Explorer
Vasco da Gama
Vista Douro
No matter how many turns your life takes, almost everything Mário Ferreira gets involved in leads to the sea and ships. From the cruise business on the Douro River to hotels and or the tourist train project on the Tua Line, the water element is almost always there in this entrepreneur’s life.
Boats and the Douro Azul company are his trademarks, but his activity and the projects he is involved in go far beyond the sea. From tourism to real estate and transportation, Mário Ferreira started an empire from a very young age that keeps growing and comprises more than 40 companies. This entrepreneur’s sense of opportunity and predatory instinct dictated a fair deal of the success he was able to consolidate in the businesses he engaged in over the years.
“Restless, with a firm resolve and always eager to do things”, in his own words, Mário Ferreira competed in the Lisbon-Dakar Rally in 2007 and ran the London marathon in 2010. He participated in the Portuguese version of the American program “Shark Tank” as one of the members of the investor panel and he was awarded dozens of prizes and distinctions.
“I have been working for so many years and for so long that I fortunately no longer work to make more money, I work for what moves me, because I like to get things done, for the sheer pleasure I get in starting a project and showing that it is possible to do it from beginning to end”, says Mário Ferreira.
He started buying old ships and recovering them. But today, when it comes to ships, he prefers building them from scratch. As for hotels, he prefers the challenge of taking old buildings and renovating them. “Renovating ships takes a lot of work and the investment is not as profitable as they wear out and die. Buildings aged 200 or 300 years are eternal”, he explains.
World Explorer
World Explorer
The connection to the sea and his many trips around the world
Mário Ferreira was born in Matosinhos, in a family of four brothers and from an early age he began to feel the fascination for the sea so close to his home. His father worked in the ports of Douro and Leixões and Mário grew accustomed to hearing the sirens of ships entering and leaving the port. But the visits to emblematic ships as a child with his father helped also awaken and increase his taste for vessels. “When Sagres sailed to Leixões we used to visit this ship. On Navy Day, you could always visit a patrol ship or a very old submarine… I loved visiting them. And there were also library vessels which travelled the world and they came to Portugal every year and I was always one of the first in line to enter these ships when they docked on the port of Leixões”, he recalls.
He always liked building things and when he was a child he dreamed of becoming an aeroplane pilot or a civil engineer, “I wanted to build houses”, he says and adds “now I do build things, but rather ships”.
Entrepreneurship has always been in his blood. “When I was very young, my father offered me a very interesting camera, with several lenses and I always liked photography from a very young age. I started having a go at it and my uncles invited me to photograph all kinds of family parties, christening, birthdays … and one day one of my best friends from high school got married, I was coming from London on my summer vacation, as I was already working there, and suddenly I was the official photographer of his wedding. It was very funny, “says Mário Ferreira.
Photography is still one of his passions today and years later he bought Foto Beleza and created the largest collection of photographs in Portugal – the Portuguese Photo Archive.
His desire to see the world led him to travel on his own at the age of 16 to England, against the wishes of his father who did not like to see his son interrupting his studies. He started working in London at a restaurant as a waiter and, when he was 19 he was already managing an Italian restaurant near King´s Road. Thanks to one of the regular customers of this place, at the age of 20 he boarded Cunard’s Vistafjord – one of the largest cruise companies in the world – to engage in his first trip around the world. “It was something I had been longing to, to travel the world working. And it was a memorable life experience to engage in this first circumnavigation at the age of 20 and I grew addicted to cruises and ships since then”, recalls Mário Ferreira. Among his memories from those days he recalls the people he met – Vistafjord was a luxury cruise ship and many of its frequent passengers were kings and former kings, presidents and former presidents, ministers and former ministers – and the places he visited in the four corners of the world. “33 years ago, travelling around the world was quite different from today”, he recalls without hiding some nostalgia and explaining that at the time the challenge was “to collect the big ports”. “At the time, there were the magnificent seven, the most emblematic ports which everybody working on a ship wanted to visit. Entering New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty was spectacular, Rio de Janeiro was also one of the great places, as well as Sydney and Hong Kong, San Francisco, sailing under the Golden Bridge in London and entering the Thames to Tower Bridge, and Lisbon ”, recalls Mário Ferreira. In the five years that ensued, he travelled many times around the world and always on board the same ship. He even hit a record of 14 months in a row travelling and working without a single day of vacation or time off. Even today the connection to cruise ships – thanks to his main business – both in his work or leisure moments is still there. He keeps going on a cruise once a year with his family and some friends.
Some of the good memories and experiences he still recalls include the 5 years he spent aboard a ship and the number of courses he took with top international experts. First of all, the many photography courses he was able to take with some of the best photographers in the world at the time, who were invited to give lectures to passengers. And other courses such as gemmology (seeing and classifying precious stones) or cooking shows (he learned to cook Italian, French and other specialities).
The Lodge Wine and Business Hotel, Gaia
Like fish in water
He bought the first ship in 1993, at the age of 25. “It was a small thing, an old cacilheiro, a passenger ship used in the Tagus River crossings, which was about to be scrapped and which Transtejo sold very cheap. We cleaned and renovated the interior with a very interesting design with the help of a Norwegian naval interior architect, a friend of mine, and we managed to have the most luxurious boat at the time sailing the Douro River”, he says. This tour ship featuring a restaurant with a capacity for 120 people, the first in the Douro Azul fleet, was named Vista Douro, after the ship where he sailed for 5 years, the Vistafjord.
Douro Azul kept growing and buying ships, gradually leaving day tour ships and focusing on hotel cruise ships.
In 2004 it launched the first project to build a hotel ship in Portugal at Viana shipyards. The company has built more than 15 new large ships since then and reinvented Portuguese shipbuilding.
From the Douro River, he expanded to central Europe. About 5 years ago, Douro Azul bought Nicko Cruises – one of the largest river cruise companies in Germany, and four times bigger than Douro Azul. With 20 ships operating on several rivers such as the Nile, Danube, Rhine, Mekong and Yangtze, in China, the company leapt forward in the internationalization strategy of Douro Azul that was long overdue. “People wonder how we managed to buy a company four times bigger than Douro Azul, without mortgaging everything,” says this businessman.
Since then, Mário Ferreira’s company has also started betting on sea cruises. “It was something we always wanted to do, having small sea liners”, says the businessman.
Today the company has around 50 riverboats – spread across the Douro River and other European rivers – along with sea expedition vessels. World Explorer was the first, and later Voyager and Navigator were added, scheduled to start operations in June. The fleet also includes Vasco da Gama, the largest cruise ship with Portuguese flag ever to be registered in Portugal, with a capacity of up to 1200 passengers.
In addition to the passion for ships and the cruise business, Mário Ferreira’s company is currently embracing several other projects. Pluris Investments, formerly Mystic Invest, is the holding company he owns along with its own company, Paula Paz Dias, and accommodates 42 companies – in different sectors such as real estate, agriculture, education, insurance, media, technology, venture capital under the name Shark Tank (whose name comes from its participation in the television program Shark Tank in 2015).
The operational headquarters are located in Porto, in a building next to the old Customs Building, and has more than 150 employees from different nationalities – Portuguese plus Austrians, Germans, French, Americans… “We need world expertise and hence the need to hire people from abroad with more experience in these areas”, says the businessman.
Mário Ferreira
Hotels and the challenge of renovating old buildings
Unlike ships, which he is passionate about, hotels have always been in Mário Ferreira’s life given both the business opportunity and the challenge of rebuilding and transforming old buildings. “One of the things that please me most is recovering and renovating buildings. Taking a very old building, considered worthless, and completely transform it”, he reports with undisguised enthusiasm.
The first hotel appeared in 1998 when Mário Ferreira renovated Solar da Rede, a manor house on the banks of the Douro River, and this too happened closely linked to ships. “At that time we didn’t have a large capacity for rooms on board, we had to have quality rooms on land and we renovated a very old manor house from 1760 and very beautiful, located on the slopes of Douro River. We created Pousada do Solar da Rede, it was the first franchising negotiated with Pousadas de Portugal which managed it”.
Later, in 2002, he bought the Vintage House Hotel in Pinhão from Taylor´s Port Wine. Both hotels have already been sold, but Mário Ferreira has not abandoned the hotel business.
And one of the works he prides himself on today is the Monumental Palace Hotel. Mário Ferreira bought “a very old and very beautiful building on Avenida dos Aliados, Monumental, which was had been closed for 20 years, completely vacant and with everything was broken”, he says. The 100-year-old building was completely renovated by the businessman and today is one of the most emblematic hotels in the country, which was sold in the meantime to a French hotel chain.
More recently, and during the Covid-19 pandemic, works on The Lodge Wine and Business Hotel in Gaia were completed. With a privileged location, almost all rooms have balconies facing Oporto’s riverfront, this is the only hotel currently owned by this businessman and is scheduled to open from May 1st.
Also in the Tourism and Hospitality sector, Mário’s company owns two buildings with 13 high luxury tourist apartments on Rua do Almada.
Tourist Train of the Tua Line
Tourist Train on the Tua Line ready to start
Another project by Mário Ferreira that has been underway for some years now is the tourist trains on the Tua line. The investments have been made and the train is ready, but the process has been dragging on and he has been faced with several bureaucratic obstacles. “It’s moving, but very slow, at the pace of a coal-powered train,” he says, laughing.
The intention is to have a tourist train – a low-speed train built in England – and to recover the two old motor vessels that used to travel the Tua Line to offer a mixed transport service for tourists and the local population.
The tourist train in the Tua Line is “an anchor project” involving also a typical wine transportation boat with a capacity of up to 120 people and the idea is to reconcile a boat ride with a train ride. To that end, this businessman explains, “the whole river will have to have a program capable of attracting schools, senior tourism, tourist groups…”
Mário Ferreira’s company also offers a set of small family boats to tour the lake, as well as round electric boats with a capacity of up to 8 people. On-board these small electric ships, with a grill in the middle, families can stroll around the pier and have a picnic in the Tua Lake, for 2 or 3 hours and a picnic basket. “They can go for a walk and then anchor and grill their Mirandela sausage and chorizo and have it with bread”, he exemplifies.
Despite all the potential and having everything ready, Mário Ferreira adds that today “the same things that were missing 3 years ago are still missing”. But the businessman believes that today mayors involved are willing to put things finally to work. “Everything is ready, let’s work”, says Mário Ferreira, adding that “if things move as planned, fine, otherwise we will not lose more time with it”.
In addition to ships, hotels and the tourist train project on the Tua Line there is Helitours, a helicopter company established in 2000, which operates tourist flights in Porto and the Douro River, and the space tourism company A Caminho das Estrelas, established in 2007 after Mário Ferreira became the first Portuguese to buy the ticket for a trip to space with Virgin Galactic. The company is the result of a partnership with Virgin Galactic and his friendship with Richard Branson and focuses on the sale of orbital flights and zero-gravity experiments.
Bluebus City Sightseeing, a company with a fleet of 10 tourist buses operating in Porto since 2012 is another of Mário Ferreira’s projects. And World of Discoveries, an Interactive Museum and Theme Park, in Porto, dedicated to Portuguese Discoveries.
In May 2020, he started a new bet and ventured into the media, with the purchase of 30.22% of Media Capital, owner of TVI and several publications.
10 QUESTIONS TO MÁRIO FERREIRA
Which project did you enjoy the most?
It’s not an easy answer and might unfair because some projects cannot be compared. We have to segment them. The renovation of Solar da Rede, when I was very young, twenty-something, gave me tremendous joy and I will never forget when the Secretary of State at the time got there and said “I came here to the building site, dirtying my shoes, just to see with my own eyes” because he didn’t believe we could renovate it so well within the deadline we had set”. It was a spectacular work, it was a dream thing. It was a major project considering my age and that gave me huge pleasure. Next was the construction of the first prototype for the Douro River of a hotel ship, with 65 luxurious rooms, which could carry up to 130 passengers. And as we have a very big limitation pertaining to the length of the dams – we have the limitation of the length, the limitation of the width, the limitation of the draught (the underwater part) and the limitation of the low bridges – and we have to make it in parallelepiped shape so has to be able to enter the navigation lock without hitting the sides, fit inside, not hitting the bridges or touching the stones in the river. It is therefore a very difficult calculation. At the time, I couldn’t find anyone in Portugal who knew how to make the naval engineering calculations for that ship and I had to find a Dutch expert in this type of construction and with him, we managed to develop a prototype. I say with him because the interior layout was always me who designed them. The Monumental renovation was also special. The biggest pleasure was not being the owner of the Monumental, it was having taken an old carcass that everybody thought was worthless and we did a beautiful project and against all odds that is there to be seen, to be enjoyed. I already went there with my wife, with my children, like tourists. That makes me happy. And that is the satisfaction, being able to look at it and see something that was abandoned for 20 years and see what it has become.
Which are your preferred means of transportation?
It depends. For short distances, the car. If I have to go to inner areas of the country the helicopter and if I have to go farther, the plane. But for leisure, the ship.
Do you have a favourite ship?
It’s always the last one because as I am directly involved in its construction, each one is always better than the last.
What is there left for you to do?
I still need to do something for which I enlisted for many, many years and that was not yet possible, but it will happen and that’s taking to space.
What was the impact of the pandemic on the cruise industry and tourism?
It was a very big impact. We have been unable to operate for a long time, but at the same time what we tried to do, and we actually did it, was turn this negative impact into an opportunity. What we did was to invest in this period of pandemic even more in the vessels and take advantage of the opportunities that came up in the market to be able to acquire as we did and venture into oceanic ships with a capacity for one thousand passengers. We were already well ahead on the expedition ships for up to 200 passengers. And if it weren’t for the crisis, we wouldn’t have bought Vasco da Gama.
What will change in this area in the post-pandemic?
Ships with lesser capacity will witness higher growth as regards immediate reservations. We see that passengers are still afraid of large crowds and I think this will be a trend, at least during this year. But people will soon forget this and throw caution to the wind.
Where would you like to have a hotel and don’t have one yet?
If there is a place in the world where I would love to have a hotel, that’s Venice. In addition to being the city where I proposed to my wife – it’s a romantic city, with beautiful buildings – it has also a lot to do with water.
Do you get a better night’s sleep on a ship or in a hotel?
On a ship, first of all. Because whether we like it or not there is always some motion – although in our large seagoing ships we don’t feel it, neither in the Douro – there is always a little bit of movement. Either because of the micro-vibrations that exist on the ship, without noise but which rock us or because of the water and wind passing through the water … Being on the high seas gives me peace of mind, I like it a lot. And if the sea is rough well, even better (he laughs).
Are there any projects you would like to engage in, outside of all investment areas you are already involved in?
I have engaged in businesses that are self-fulfilling. We cannot engage in everything. For those who don’t know me well, venturing into the media business has considered a major adventure. And I’m not just talking about Media Capital and TVI, I’m talking about radio, Plural, etc. It’s a very large, multifaceted company, with several pillars and I think there is a lot of room for growth and it is an area I have been focusing on a lot, contrary to what some people might say. It takes a large investment of time and works behind the scenes. It’s slow progress. You have to take it slow and do it well.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Resting and living on income (laughs). Everyone thinks I’m going to work until I’m 100… but not me. One of the secrets of life is that people should know when they should stop and make room for the young.
