Newsan entered the fishing industry when Guillermo Moreno’s government required the company to export in order to continue importing. It eventually became Argentina’s leading seafood exporter. Fifteen years later, the group changed direction again and entered the electricity business. Luis Galli explains how both transformations took place.
In 2011, the Secretariat of Domestic Trade imposed a condition on importers that was easy to state but difficult to meet: to bring goods into the country, they had to find an exporter capable of offsetting those dollars. Newsan imported electronic kits for assembly in Tierra del Fuego and was among the country’s largest importers.
Luis Galli recalls the instruction without dramatizing it. To continue importing, they needed to partner with an exporter. What followed was a table around which exporters began to parade.
“We set up a table where we met with exporters to see how we could bring together enough exports to continue importing,” he says.
That was when the Glikman family appeared, and Newsan eventually partnered with them in the fishing business. Miguel Glikman later joined the board of Newsan Food, but Galli admits that Moreno pushed them into a business they had never planned to enter and that, every so often, he still reminds him of it.
Newsan Food began in 2011 as an intermediary and later entered the entire value chain, from the catch to the sale. Since 2014, it has been the country’s largest seafood exporter. It operates more than 40 vessels and twelve plants and sells in over 70 markets. In June, it added Glaciar Pesquera, a company specializing in Patagonian scallops frozen on board, as well as its logistics center in France.
Galli is president, CEO and a shareholder of Newsan, the group founded by Rubén Cherñajovsky that grew through the electronics industry in Tierra del Fuego and brands such as Noblex, Atma, Philco and Siam. He is the group’s second-in-command and the executive who runs its operations.
The second transformation is taking place now and is moving in the opposite direction. The first emerged from a restriction; this one arose from an opening that left assets for sale following the departure of several multinational companies.
In July 2024, Newsan acquired P&G Argentina and, through that transaction, entered the consumer goods business. Meanwhile, Cherñajovsky and Galli invested personally in Edison Energía, the holding company owned by Juan and Patricio Neuss and the Inverlat fund, which also owns Havanna.
Edison moved quickly. In March 2025, it acquired EDET, EJESA, LITSA and the CEMPSA hydroelectric plant. In December, it added Alicurá and Cerros Colorados for $226 million. This year, together with Genneia, it acquired the state’s stake in Citelec, the controlling shareholder of Transener, with a bid of $356 million. The amount almost doubled the minimum price established in the tender documents and surpassed the offers made by Central Puerto and Edenor.
In a year and a half, Edison became one of the three or four most important electricity companies in Argentina, Galli says.
“We invested more than $700 million during that period.”
Regarding Juan Neuss’s close relationship with Santiago Caputo and the doubts surrounding Edison’s rapid growth, Galli says the partnership began earlier and that the Neuss family contributed experience that Newsan did not have.
“Distribution is the most difficult business to manage, and they already knew that territory through EDERSA, the electricity distributor in Río Negro. That gave us a certain degree of confidence.”
He also clarifies that the first acquisition was a private transaction with no connection to the government, while the following three were international public tenders involving separate technical and financial bids.
He speaks about the economic program from a concrete position: he is investing. After two and a half years, he says the overall assessment is highly positive. He also points out something the government usually says with less emphasis. The program was not designed to revive consumption immediately, but to improve the conditions for investment. The recovery in incomes, he warns, will take longer.
He estimates that consumer spending has fallen by between 10% and 15% compared with 2023, although he notes that the decline began much earlier, in 2011.
For Galli, the Tierra del Fuego regime functions as a long-standing version of the RIGI. It grants tax benefits in exchange for investment in a location that capital would not reach on its own. He acknowledges that the sector never learned how to defend the regime effectively and warns of a possible contradiction: celebrating incentives today while criticizing oil or mining companies tomorrow for paying lower taxes after investing under those same rules.
International partners, he adds, are not asking about the next quarter. They want to know whether Argentina will maintain those conditions beyond 2027, regardless of who wins the election, and whether it will be able to provide legal certainty without changing direction again.
When the interviewer raises the possibility of a Peronist victory next year and asks whether the group would reinvent itself once again, Galli laughs first and then answers:
“It is part of our DNA. We spend little time portraying ourselves as victims and a great deal of time taking action.”
For him, that means moving from one business to another, accelerating when necessary, slowing down and reinventing the company. It is exactly what they did when a secretary of commerce they had not chosen sent them fishing.
