Good morning! Today, we talk about the Oxxo phenomenon in Brazil. The Central Bank’s move to tame the foreign exchange rate. And Brazilian optimism on the rise.
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A Mexican invasion in São Paulo
Walk around São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, and it won’t be long before you run into an Oxxo. The Mexican convenience store chain recently opened its 500th store in São Paulo, just over three years after it began operations in Brazil. In 2023 alone, Oxxo opened 200 new stores — an average of one every two days, all of them directly owned and managed by Oxxo.
Context. Oxxo is omnipresent in its home country of Mexico, where its stores also operate as banking correspondents, processing payments for a range of organizations for a fee. The chain does this through the Oxxo invoice, a document with a barcode that can be paid in cash at any of the 21,500 Oxxo stores across Mexico.
- According to Banxico, there are more Oxxo stores in the country than there are commercial bank branches....