Local hero

摘要

In The late 1970s Bill Gates predicted "a computer on every desk and in every home". Laercio Cosentino, an engineer at siga, a Brazilian maker of software for mainframes, concluded that therefore every small firm in his country, even the ubiquitous street-corner padaria (bakery), would eventually have one too. In 1983 Mr Cosentino, then just 22, convinced his boss to set up a separate business to concentrate on serving small and medium-sized enterprises (smes). Thirty years on, the company, nowadays called Totvs (pronounced "totus"), dominates Brazil's $1.9-billion-a-year market for enterprise software. Investors have piled in. On October 22nd Totvs disclosed that the world's biggest fund manager, BlackRock, had increased its stake to 5%.