Jose Llontop

Jose joined Salt Creek Capital as an Executive Partner in 2022. He brings over 30 years of general management experience in the Building Materials and Industrial Manufacturing sectors. He is currently an Independent Director of the Board at the Barton Group, a manufacturer of garnet material used in Waterjet cutting and sandblasting applications, where he serves as a member of the Audit & Finance, and the Nominating & Governance Committees.

Prior to joining Salt Creek, Jose was the President & CEO, at Giant Cement Holding Inc., a $250M revenue Cement Company, where he led the company’s turnaround from a negative operating profit position to $37M in EBITDA within a four-year period, prior to selling a majority stake – at a premium valuation – to a Mexican conglomerate owned by the Carlos Slim group.

He has lived in ten (10) countries and has had extensive domestic and international experience, having led five post-merger integration acquisitions and performing an equal number of business turnarounds in several regions primarily at CEMEX, a Global Building Materials Company, most notably as the Regional President of a $1B vertically integrated business in Central Eastern Europe & Israel, and before that, as President of the Company’s $250M Egyptian operations.

Jose has a passion for tackling complicated issues. His success at branding commodity products and shape strategy in the cement industry caught the attention of academia, most recently in a Darden School of Business case study (CEMEX in Egypt: Global Best Practices, or Country-Specific Acumen? - UVA-S-0397, Oct 03 2022). Prior to that he was also the main protagonist in a Harvard Business case study (“CEMEX: Rewarding the Egyptian Retailers”, HBS, March 22, 2006).

His early experience is rooted in manufacturing and industrial distribution with Ingersoll-Rand’s Air Compressor group division, first in the US and then as the company’s Managing Director for its Mexican operations. He holds a BSME from the University of Virginia, and an MBA from the Jones School of Business at Rice University. He is also a graduate of The General Manager program, at the Harvard Business School.