Cunha Vaz & Associados, also known as CV&A, celebrates its 20th anniversary on 15 June 2023. During these two decades, CV&A established itself as a leading communications consultancy, especially focused on institutional relations and public affairs in Portugal, with a presence in Portuguese speaking Africa and Brazil.

Ever since launching, CV&A has been in the vanguard of corporate and financial communications, providing its clients with strategic consultancy and innovative solutions to navigate their complex business environments, dealing with the most diverse and different stakeholders. In keeping with its commitment to excellence, CV&A has received consistent recognition as a benchmark reference in the sector.

Over these years, CV&A has worked with a vast range of clients, including the largest national corporations, multinational firms, government agencies and NGOs. Its experience in reputation management, crisis communication and engaging with interested parties helped these clients achieve their objectives and build long lasting relationships with their stakeholders.

Looking to the future, CV&A maintains its commitment both to provide the highest level of service to its clients and to expand its presence in key markets. With a talented team of professionals and a track record of success, CV&A is set to continue its trajectory of growth and bring about positive impacts on the business scenario throughout many years to come.

After all, CV&A celebrates its 20th anniversary with due pride at being market leader in terms of turnover, profits and EBITDA and with only 32 members of staff.

• In 2022, we recorded over ten million euros in turnover — with only 2.5% of this stemming either from central, regional and local government or from state owned companies — and three million euros in profit (of which 10% are distributed to staff and 5% donated to civil society entities – culture, sport and social works).
• In culture, in sport and in supporting children around the world, no other company in the sector invests like CV&A. We sponsor the Portuguese rugby team — LUSITANOS —, and exclusively backed the donation of a work of art by Vhils, Alexandre Farto, to the Embassy of Portugal in Japan. We support IPDAL and Casa da América Latina. We are members of both the UN Global Compact Network and BCSD Portugal. Children have always been a target of our intentions. When we supported Acreditar, when providing DVD readers to the pediatric ward at Hospital Santa Maria, when we became patrons of Raríssimas, when providing support for children in Guinea Bissau and Angola, we were always grateful for being allowed to collaborate. We have never advertised this. However, our team deserve, after these twenty years, that there is a record of how they contributed towards society through undertaking these activities. On the date of our twentieth anniversary, it is Ukrainian child refugees in Kyiv who deserve our support.
• Furthermore in 2022, CV&A became the first consultancy to be certified by DGERT to provide communications training, which endows us with the factor for differentiation in which we take due pride. We have simultaneously subscribed to the BCSD and UNGNP platforms ensuring measures that again enable CV&A to make a sustainable contribution to the economic development of its surrounding society.
• Now, under the auspices of the 20th anniversary commemorations, the Nova School of Business and Economics and CV&A are announcing the launch of the executive training program “Leadership and Crisis Management”.

Two decades of contributing to the success of the people, institutions and companies that choose to have us at their side. This is the very DNA of CV&A, written by its people, with the help of its suppliers and all designed to best serve its clients.

The now-resumed CV&A conferences stretch back right to the earliest activities of the firm. We always strove to bring the thinking of the world to our country and provide continuity to what the Portuguese of the 16th century did when embarking “…for seas never before sailed…” and who adventured overseas and, despite everything, “… from their salt came the tears of Portugal”, knowing how to bring other cultures back to us, enriching ourselves while simultaneously leaving behind the seeds of a country greater than its own territory. “Iberian Relationships and the Context of the Transatlantic Dialogue”, by the former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, the “Leadership: Taking Charge” Conference with the U.S. General Colin Powell, followed by “The International Economy Today: Challenges and Opportunities” with John W. Snow, the former U.S. Secretary of State for the Treasury and the extremely current speech “An Inconvenient Truth” by the former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore were landmarks in a cycle that was set to last. “Economic Development and World Peace”, featured former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “Embracing our Common Humanity”, with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and “Challenging Poverty: The Growth of Microcredit”, with Muhammad Yunus, the Indian banker, economics professor and the father of micro-credit, an initiative that gained him the Nobel Peace Prize, were the conferences that followed. Furthermore, other brilliant speakers were still to come, including Mário Monti, Gerard Schroeder, who discussed “The European Crisis and the Necessary Reforms”, David Plouffe, the American political marketing strategist and behind the first presidential election campaign of Barak Obama, and Álvaro Uribe, the former President of Colombia and acknowledged as the man who put his country back on the global agenda, speaking on the theme “The Rise of the South American Emerging Markets”. Leading journalists got their opportunity to speak at the conference cycle “Portugal: Threat or Opportunity”, with Raphael Minder (Herald Tribune), Wolfgang Münchau (Financial Times) and Raul Llores (Folha de São Paulo), representing three of the world’s most prestigious newspapers.

The Oporto office, in the extraordinary Bolsa Palace, with constant support from the Oporto Commercial Association, was the stage for the First Palace Conference Cycle, on the theme of “The World seen from Oporto: the foreign policies of some of the leading players in world diplomacy explained by themselves”. The Second Cycle approached the theme “The Economy Seen by Corporate Leaders” and both resulted in books that clearly convey the importance of exchanging ideas. The Third Palace Conference Cycle: “The Portuguese Economy as seen by its Regulators” was also a resounding success while the fourth Cycle, “The Economy from the perspective of Great Economists”, closed this period with a golden key.

The twenty years of experiences now being commemorated are the mirror of its Clients, Suppliers and, of course, Staff. The path of the company was always coherent but the market has many fluctuations of growth and contraction. Portugal and other markets the firm operates in went through their own distinct cycles – political and economic – and the financial health existing today went through troubled times between 2012 and 2015. A badly calculated business risk in an international market and the convulsions resulting from a bank going under dragging down all the companies directly or indirectly related, forced CV&A into drastic measures in order to be able to survive. The firm counted on the support of the banks with which it maintained commercial relationships, some suppliers and, as always, its staff.

The general overview of the twenty years under celebration is one of strong and sustained growth both in terms of the number of clients and in fundamental values. The variety of services provided and their preponderance in terms of turnover has varied alongside the weightings of our international markets reflecting the ways in which the management was able to respond, to a greater or lesser extent, to the demands of each culture. The weightings of product communication, institutional communication, coupled with the financial facet, political communication, the changes in the ways, means and methods ongoing in the digital world means adapting to the times lived in with the emergence of public issues with higher profiles in recent years and with this trend set to deepen.

The company that started out in Lisbon, today employs 32 staff and also has offices in Oporto, Funchal, Luanda, Maputo and São Paulo and, as a member of the H/Advisors (the new Havas Group brand for the Public Relations sector) network, ensuring services in many more countries on these continents.

In its various years of life, the company participated in the largest financial operations taking place in Portugal both on the buy-side and on the sell-side – highlighting the Sonae Group takeover bid for the then PT telecommunications company that only failed because of political interference -, and has always led in sports communication, serving as the non-stadium communications and marketing consultancy for the Euro 2004 championship, in an important partnership with UEFA, which would turn into a foundation for the other services provided in this area. The strategic advising of Sport Lisboa e Benfica constituted, in parallel, one of the most important brands for the public relations and strategic consultancy of the company. The company continued to render support to UEFA in the following years and organising the communications and marketing campaigns outside of stadiums for the European Sub-21, Female Football, Futsal, Beach Football, Champions League and League of Nations football tournaments.

In conjunction with its Spanish partner, Grupo Albion, the firm advised on the financial and marketing communications for the Ferrovial takeover of the British Airport Authority, which runs Heathrow and Gatwick, among other airports.

Internationally, Cunha Vaz & Associados was the company contracted by the Episcopal Conference of Angola and São Tomé to coordinate all the organisational, logistics and communications activities around the visit of His Highness, Pope Benedict XVI to Angola and with Cunha Vaz & Associados, one year later, selected by the Angolan state and the Organising Committee of the African Nations Cup to stage the draw, opening and closing ceremonies at the mega-sporting event that was CAN 2010.

This was followed by the company’s selection as organiser for the entire event presenting the National Squad for the World Cup 2010 and the consultancy responsible for media communications and advisor on the visit by His Highness Pope Benedict XVI to Portugal followed by winning the tender to promote the African Games in Mozambique in 2011.

There was then the first intervention in the international political world with the CV&A providing advisory services to the MpD (Movement for Democracy) in Cape Verde, which won the local elections, strengthened the number of mandates and its share of the votes. This was then followed by two victorious presidential campaigns in Cape Verde, three similar campaigns in Guinea Bissau and various different contributions to national, regional and local election campaigns in Portugal of which we are deeply proud. We do not win elections. That is the work of politicians. We contribute to the electoral campaigns and these inevitably do not only produce successes – and one of the campaigns which we recollect with greatest pride was for António Carmona Rodrigues when our candidate did not win the election. The most recent political campaign in which CV&A intervened was in Israel in support of the moderate “New Hope” party that lost the elections but gave us insights into a hitherto unknown reality.

We shall close with our official figures:

• Turnover: €10,028,849.43 (ten million, twenty-eight thousand, eight-hundred and forty-nine euros and forty-three cents);
• Number of staff: 32 (thirty-two);
• Pre-tax profit: €3,113,062.66 (three million, one-hundred and thirteen thousand and sixty-two euros and sixty-six cents);
• EBIT: €3,212,182.10 (three million, two-hundred and twelve thousand, one-hundred and eighty-two euros and ten cents);
• EBITDA: €3,136,368.85 (three million, one-hundred and thirty-six thousand, three-hundred and sixty-eight euros and eight-five cents).

Portugal and the other countries in which we operate have progressed greatly given their recent pasts and less than fifty years of history. However, there is much to be done. Indeed, time to get to work! We count on everybody to look to the future with optimism. At a time of global change, with great international political uncertainties, which generate repercussions for the economies in which we act, all the efforts are scant to ensure the construction of a sustainable future, with respect for the histories of peoples, without judgements of the past and with an exclusive concern to help build a fairer world for all.