Castellón’s Mediterranean newspaper handed out its annual business awards before nearly four hundred guests last Tuesday. The top honors went to Luis Hernández, president of Grespania, and Pepe Pellicer, a leading figure at APE Grupo. Both companies stand out as benchmarks in their ceramic specialties and boast a broad international footprint. Grespania employs 842 people, while APE reports a turnover of 60 million with 150 staff. Pellicer has been a pioneer among Spanish exporters to China, a market now reached by the Castellón company in more than 120 countries. He recalled landing in Shanghai in 1992 with the sale of 50 by 50 centimeter red ceramic tiles. Before that, exports came via representatives and stockists in Hong Kong and Singapore, which opened in the seventies. Pellicer, then eighty-one, remembers his first major venture abroad as Australia, after expanding across Europe in the late sixties. The company later sold its wares in Vietnam and Cambodia as well. Today, the next generation has taken the helm of the family business.
Spain is a nation rich with remarkable yet often unknown entrepreneurial stories like that of APE Grupo. A few months earlier, the author met Manuel Puigdemont, owner of Pordamsa, an Empordà porcelain company founded in 1975. Puigdemont, born in Amer and unaffiliated with the former president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, has championed the idea that dinnerware need not be round. His plates are featured on menus of leading restaurants and luxury hotels, and his design center near La Bisbal d’Empordà in Girona attracts chefs from around the world. Together with his team, he creates plates and kitchenware as a foundation for gastronomic artistry.
Often, business journalism gravitates toward deciphering the strategies of large Ibex-linked corporations and wealthy family groups. Yet the real driving forces are the tractor elements that propel the Spanish brand outward and inward, thanks to publicity and the need to explain projects to earn and maintain trust among stakeholders. There are hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized companies that hold the business fabric together, representing 99% of firms. The Ministry of Industry in Spain reports 1,307,634 companies with 1 to 249 employees. Medium-sized firms, those with 50 to 249 workers, count 25,017 entities employing 2.4 million people. Firms with more than 250 employees number 4,977 and employ 5.8 million.
The prosperity and progress of a region depend on cooperation and healthy competition among firms of different scales within key sectors. Advocacy and support for clusters, which often thrive within the Mediterranean Corridor, remain essential. In Castellón’s ceramics industry, the most influential groups include Fernando Roig and the Soriano and Colónques families along with Pamesa, a giant largely controlled by Porcelanosa. Pamesa projects a strong European leadership in ceramic production and pursues growth through strategic moves. At the awards gathering, Roig was celebrated not only for his business reach but also for a venture that has resonated globally: Villarreal Club de Fútbol, a success story that has captivated fans worldwide. In recent times, clubs funded by Middle Eastern investors have surged across Spain and Europe, and fans continue to cheer the iconic yellow submarines.
Castellón stands as the heart of Spain’s pottery cluster, a region that navigated a period of crisis in the late 1970s and then transformed. Today, with energy prices rising and gas remaining vital to ceramic production, the sector faces new challenges. The industry has faced ERTEs and reduced output, compounded by the war in Ukraine. In response, Pamesa has begun partnering on hydrogen development as a gradual substitute for gas, a strategy that promises to lower costs across the entire sector and could reshape the industry’s energy economics.