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SIAM was born in 1910, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), as a manufacturing company of bread making machines or bread mixers. In only a few decades, the company had diversified its production, becoming the largest metallurgical company in South America. During the first fifty years of existence, SIAM learned how to successfully adjust to the changes in the Argentine scenario, shifting from an open and deregulated economy to an increasingly closed and highly-regulated system. However, from the 1960s onwards, SIAM started to experience a series of productive, organizational and financial adversities, until its final crisis in the 1970s. In that sense, the case study (divided into two parts, A and B), offers relevant information to discuss the various decisions the companies made, in light of the opportunities and obstacles encountered, within a series of contexts marked by an overall growing level of regulation, uncertainty and institutional and macro-economic imbalance. Is SIAM's meteoric rise a synthesis of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period in Latin America, phase in which the State promoted industrialization oriented to the domestic market as a development strategy? Or is this an example of a firm with an extremely ambitious diversification policy and with management problems?

SIAM was born in 1910, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), as a manufacturing company of bread making machines or bread mixers. In only a few decades, the company had diversified its production, becoming the largest metallurgical company in South America. During the first fifty years of existence, SIAM learned how to successfully adjust to the changes in the Argentine scenario, shifting from an open and deregulated economy to an increasingly closed and highly-regulated system. However, from the 1960s onwards, SIAM started to experience a series of productive, organizational and financial adversities, until its final crisis in the 1970s. In that sense, the case study (divided into two parts, A and B), offers relevant information to discuss the various decisions the companies made, in light of the opportunities and obstacles encountered, within a series of contexts marked by an overall growing level of regulation, uncertainty and institutional and macro-economic imbalance. Is SIAM's meteoric rise a synthesis of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period in Latin America, phase in which the State promoted industrialization oriented to the domestic market as a development strategy? Or is this an example of a firm with an extremely ambitious diversification policy and with management problems?

Examines the career of Ernesto Tornquist, a cosmopolitan financier considered to be the most significant entrepreneur in Argentina at the end of the 19th century. Tornquist created a diversified business group, linked to the political elite, which integrated Argentina into the trading and financial networks of the first global economy. Provides an opportunity to understand why Argentina was such a successful economy at this time, and to debate whether its very success laid the basis for the country's subsequent poor economic performance.