Surgalare S.A.

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What it is

Surgalare S.A. was incorporated and registered on 15 August 2011 and began operations in October 2011 for the processing and sale of non-metallic waste, such as paper and plastics, converting them into secondary raw materials. It claims to be Ecuador’s largest collector and servicer of paper recycling nationwide.

Its official market classification is “collection, treatment and disposal of waste, recovery of materials,” encompassing recycling of cardboard, paper, plastic, PET bottles, scrap metal, textiles, wood, glass and electronic waste. The strategic pivot of recent years has been to feed that collected scrap into its own paper mill rather than selling it outright — less revenue on paper, more profit in the bank.

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Who owns it

The company’s capital is represented by 794,187 ordinary shares of $1.00 each; of these, Paperplace S.A.S. holds 99.97%, with only 264 shares (0.03%) held by Guerrero Sempertegui K.

F. directly.

Paperplace S.A.S. is itself a family vehicle: Econ.

Jorge Fabián Guerrero Vázquez holds 67% of Paperplace, and Ing. Karina Fabiola Guerrero Sempertegui holds the remaining 33%, both Ecuadorian nationals.

In practice, the Guerrero family controls the company entirely; there is no public free float. The shareholders are also the company’s principal executives, and the board of directors has not yet been formally constituted — formalising governance is stated as a future goal.

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Who runs it

Jorge Fabián Guerrero Vázquez serves as Gerente General (CEO) of Surgalare S.A., a role confirmed across multiple regulatory filings. He also signed the sworn declaration of unencumbered assets before a Guayaquil notary in October 2025 in connection with the latest bond issue.

A separate CFO or finance director is not disclosed in available sources; the rating reports note that senior ownership and management are effectively the same people at this stage of the company’s development.

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The money, in plain words

Revenue held steady at $10.22 million in 2023, then fell 20.6% to $8.11 million in 2024 — not because the business shrank, but because recycled material that was once sold to outside buyers is now consumed internally by the paper mill. That trade-off is working: the cost of what it takes to make each dollar of sales fell from 92 cents in 2022 to just 70 cents in 2024, a dramatic improvement in gross efficiency — a cost-of-sales ratio dropping from 92% to 70% (our calculation from GlobalRatings data).

Net profit (Utilidad del Ejercicio) rose from $140,391 in 2022 to $299,839 in 2023 and $341,285 in 2024. That means the company now keeps about 4.2 cents of profit from every dollar of sales — a net profit margin of 4.2% (our calculation) — modest in absolute terms but more than double the margin it earned just two years ago.

Return on equity, the annual profit owners earn on their invested capital, averaged 3.4% over the three-year period, low by international standards but rising.

Total assets grew 141.6%, from $13.06 million in 2022 to $31.43 million in 2024, funded by a mix of supplier credit, bank debt and bonds; shareholders’ equity stood at $10.54 million at year-end 2024, giving a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.98 times — meaning the company carries roughly two dollars of debt for every dollar of owners’ capital, a level GlobalRatings considers controlled and within covenants.

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What it is doing now

In December 2025, GlobalRatings assigned its AAA– rating to Surgalare’s second bond emission, based on audited financials for 2022–2024; the Superintendencia de Compañías approved the issue under resolution SCVS-INMV-DNAR-2025-00003156 for up to $10 million. Separately, in October 2025 the shareholders’ meeting approved a second commercial-paper programme of up to $4.5 million, adding short-term market funding on top of the longer bond.

Together these two facilities give the company up to $14.5 million in new capital-markets financing to fund equipment and working capital.

The stated next growth driver is a new toilet-paper production line, with supermarket supply contracts already signed — a move from raw material into branded consumer goods that would change the company’s revenue profile significantly if it scales.

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What to watch

• Revenue recovery vs. margin expansion: the company deliberately sacrificed top-line revenue to build margins; investors in its bonds need to see whether the new paper-mill capacity restores sales volume without eroding the cost gains.
• Consumer-goods pivot: the toilet-paper line targets supermarket contracts, a lower-margin, higher-volume game that requires a different commercial discipline than B2B scrap trading.
• Leverage trajectory: debt-to-equity of 1.98x at end-2024 is being extended further by new bond and commercial-paper issues; the regulator’s 70% debt-to-assets covenant is the hard ceiling to monitor.
• Governance formalisation: the company has no board of directors yet; as it raises more public debt, creditor and regulatory pressure to install independent oversight will grow.
• Ecuador macro risk: Ecuador’s GDP grew 4.3% year-on-year in Q2 2025, reversing a sharp 2024 contraction, which should support recycled-material demand — but the country’s elevated sovereign-risk premium keeps borrowing costs high for all Ecuadorian issuers.

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This is news, not investment advice.