Almacenes Boyaca S.A.

What it is

Almacenes Boyacá sells everything from raw building materials to finished homeware, both wholesale and retail, dealing in domestic and imported goods. As of 2020 it operated nine stores nationwide, with the head office and administrative hub in Guayaquil on Avenida Juan Tanca Marengo.

The company was incorporated on 29 April 1965, making it one of Ecuador’s longer-lived listed retailers — sixty years in a market that has seen many competitors come and go. Its brand describes itself as a national chain with the best products for the home.

Who owns it

Almacenes Boyacá is governed by a shareholders’ assembly (Junta General de Accionistas), and operationally run by a Presidente as set out in its corporate statute. Not published: the controlling shareholders’ names and exact ownership percentages do not appear in the BVG issuer page, the 2020 bond prospectus (the most recent publicly available primary filing), or SCVS’s public search portal.

Under Ecuador’s Ley de Mercado de Valores, listed bond issuers must file audited financials but are not required to publish shareholder registries in machine-readable form without a specific regulatory order.

The company’s capital social (paid-in equity) stood at $3.75M as of December 2019, raised from $2.71M following a capital increase completed that year — a sign that the owners were willing to put fresh money in. No institutional or state ownership has been identified in any available source.

Who runs it

Not published: the executive president’s name and the composition of the board of directors are not disclosed in the BVG issuer page, the most recent BVG bond prospectus (July 2020), or the SCVS public portal. Companies supervised by the SCVS must file audited financial statements, including balance sheets, income statements, cash flow and equity-change statements, in the first four months of each year — but executive names are not part of that mandatory public disclosure.

A request to the company’s investor-relations contact or the SCVS registry would be the correct route to verify the current leadership.

The money, in plain words

The clearest window into Boyacá’s finances comes from audited statements filed with the BVG for a 2020 bond issue. Bonds from this issuance have been quoted on the BVG at various prices, reflecting an active secondary market in its fixed-income instruments.

Sales reached $39.34M in 2018, then fell to $33.21M in 2019 as Ecuador’s economy slowed — a revenue decline of about 15.6% in a single year (our calculation). The net profit margin was 0.77% in 2019, meaning the company kept less than one cent of profit from every dollar of sales — low even for a wholesaler, reflecting heavy reliance on borrowed money.

Total debt relative to owners’ equity (the debt-to-equity ratio) rose from 2.32 times in 2016 to 3.36 times in 2019 and 3.95 times by May 2020 — meaning lenders, not owners, funded nearly four-fifths of everything the company owns. The most recently reported revenue growth was 16.8%, a strong rebound that, if sustained, would lift absolute sales well above the pre-COVID peak; but absolute current figures are locked in a paywalled commercial database and not available in open filings at time of writing.

What it is doing now

After COVID forced Boyacá to close three of its nine branches permanently and lay off more than 160 staff, the company pivoted: it expanded online sales, launched a dropshipping arrangement with key suppliers to cut inventory risk, and tightened credit controls on its wholesale book. Revenue is now growing again — up 16.8% in the most recent year — and total assets are expanding by about 5%, suggesting the leaner post-pandemic structure is translating into real volume gains.

The SCVS published its 2024 company rankings in May 2025, covering audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 2024; Boyacá’s entry in that dataset would carry the most current absolute revenue and profit figures, accessible via the SCVS public portal at appscvsmovil.supercias.gob.ec.

What to watch

• Leverage. With debt running at nearly four times equity, any rise in Ecuador’s borrowing costs or a slowdown in construction activity tightens the margin for error fast.
• Bond maturities. Boyacá has issued at least five series of bonds through the BVG. Refinancing terms will signal how the market prices its credit risk post-recovery.
• Branch count. The company shrank from nine stores to six during COVID. Whether it rebuilds the network — or doubles down on digital and dropshipping — determines whether the current revenue growth is structural or cyclical.
• Ownership transparency. Ecuador’s move toward greater SCVS disclosure requirements may eventually surface the shareholder register. That would be the first public confirmation of who controls this sixty-year-old family-style business.

This is news, not investment advice.