By Brazil Stock Guide — Ronaldo José Neves de Carvalho, the businessman who helped transform Drogaria São Paulo from a family-owned company with about 10 stores into one of Brazil’s largest pharmacy chains, has died at the age of 82.
Carvalho died on Wednesday, September 30, after suffering a sudden medical emergency while staying in Paris, according to industry groups. A founder and the first president of Abrafarma, Brazil’s association of major pharmacy chains, he was one of the longest-serving and most influential figures in the country’s drugstore industry.
Born in São Paulo on May 22, 1944, Ronaldo was the son of Thomaz de Carvalho, a pharmacist and one of the founders of Drogaria São Paulo. The company was established in 1943 by a group of 32 investors gathered around Thomaz, Claudio Duarte and Francisco Brandi, initially as a largely wholesale pharmaceutical business in downtown São Paulo. Decades later, Thomaz’s son would help take the company in the opposite direction: toward large-scale retail.
Ronaldo’s own life also mirrored the transformation of São Paulo.
As a child, he lived in a large house in Jabaquara, at a time when much of the neighborhood was still made up of small farms and open land. From his home, he could see Congonhas Airport.
In an oral-history interview preserved by Museu da Pessoa, Carvalho recalled that, at the age of 10 or 11, he and his friends would ride their bicycles onto the airport runway, when air traffic was a fraction of what it is today. Their fun would end when mounted police appeared. The boys would race for the exits — only to come back a few days later.
“Every kid does something foolish,” he recalled.
Ronaldo also crossed parts of the city on roller skates. He said he once covered the roughly eight kilometers between his home in Jabaquara and the Liceu Pasteur school, where he had studied since childhood.
Years later, another school memory resurfaced unexpectedly. After buying an apartment that had belonged to Brazilian rock icon Rita Lee, he was surprised when the singer greeted him by name at their first meeting.
They had both attended Liceu Pasteur, although Lee was several years younger and Ronaldo did not remember her from school. She, he said, remembered the tall older student who played sports.
Athletics occupied a significant part of his youth. At 16, Ronaldo began competing for São Paulo’s Clube Pinheiros and remained on the team for about six years. His main events were the triple jump and hurdles, but he also competed in the long jump, discus and relay races.
He said he was never a specialist in a single event. His strength was being able to score points in several.
On one occasion, when his parents finally attended a meet, they were startled to see him repeatedly appear in different competitions.
At 17, Carvalho left home to study at the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, or ITA, one of Brazil’s most prestigious engineering schools, in São José dos Campos. He graduated in mechanical engineering in 1966.
His first job was at Companhia Brasileira de Cartuchos, or CBC, an ammunition manufacturer, where he worked in production planning and sales forecasting. His final university project already dealt with an idea that would later become central to his work at Drogaria São Paulo: using historical data to forecast demand.
Before joining the family company, he also worked at consulting firm Boucinhas & Campos. There, he participated in a project for CMTC, São Paulo’s former municipal transport company, and later said he was proud to have helped persuade it not to abandon the city’s trolleybus network at a time when there was pressure to replace electric vehicles with diesel-powered buses.
Ronaldo formally joined Drogaria São Paulo in June 1971, at the age of 27.
The company had about 10 stores at the time and operated simultaneously in wholesale and retail. His engineering background quickly began to influence the way the business was run.
One of his first battles was against what he saw as excessive inventory.
The pharmaceutical trade traditionally bought drugs in standardized boxes and quantities. Ronaldo wanted to know exactly how much each store sold and, if the numbers called for it, order 137 units instead of rounding the purchase to 100 or 200.
The approach faced resistance both inside the company and among suppliers.
He later recalled, laughing, that one of the first orders made under his calculations was specially labeled by the company’s buyer: “Dr. Ronaldo’s purchases.”
It was a way of making clear who should take the blame if the new inventory system went wrong.
It didn’t.
The sales-forecasting and inventory-management system he adapted from his experience at CBC became one of the tools used to modernize Drogaria São Paulo. Ronaldo reduced inventories, increased the frequency of orders and clashed with pharmaceutical companies accustomed to selling large volumes at once.
To him, four orders of 2,500 units were economically equivalent to a single 10,000-unit purchase — except that smaller, more frequent orders left less money tied up on shelves.
The same logic extended to medicines themselves.
Ronaldo liked to tell the story of a large purchase of Novalgina, a widely used painkiller in Brazil, made during a promotional campaign. In his view, there was a conceptual flaw in the idea that advertising could persuade people to consume more medicine.
Advertising might persuade customers to buy a drug at one pharmacy instead of another, he argued, but nobody would simply open a bathroom drawer and take an aspirin just because a box happened to be sitting there.
The effort to rationalize inventory was accompanied by a more consequential strategic decision.
Drogaria São Paulo gradually withdrew from wholesale distribution to focus on retail.
Ronaldo saw an inherent contradiction in operating on both sides of the market: the stronger the wholesaling arm became, the more the company helped its own retail competitors; the more it strengthened its stores, the more directly it competed with its wholesale customers.
The transition took years but helped define the company that would emerge in the decades that followed.
Carvalho also became an important voice in the organization of Brazil’s pharmacy industry.
He was one of the architects of Abrafarma and its first president. The association began taking shape in the early 1990s amid disputes over mandatory duty rosters, store opening hours and municipal rules limiting when pharmacies could operate.
One of Carvalho’s remarks captured the argument he made at the time: being on duty should mean an obligation to open, not an obligation for every other pharmacy to remain closed.
Drogaria São Paulo was also among the chains that helped pioneer 24-hour stores and discount and benefits programs for retirees, practices that later became widespread across the Brazilian market.
Another defining moment in Carvalho’s business career came in 2011, when Drogaria São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro-based Drogarias Pacheco agreed to combine their operations.
The talks brought together Ronaldo Carvalho and Samuel Barata, two veterans of an industry undergoing rapid consolidation.
The merger created Grupo DPSP with 691 stores across five states and gross revenue of R$4.4 billion in the 12 months through June of that year. Before the transaction, Drogaria São Paulo alone operated 348 stores.
The negotiations also reflected the personalities of the two businessmen.
Reports at the time described Carvalho and Barata as hard negotiators. When talks began, each initially imagined buying out the other. They eventually concluded that combining the two companies made more sense.
The deal was ultimately celebrated over a simple lunch at a law office on Avenida Faria Lima in São Paulo.
It was a fitting outcome for the way Carvalho had managed Drogaria São Paulo for four decades: less concerned with preserving the way things had always been done than with asking whether there was a more rational way to do them.
The engineer who learned to forecast ammunition inventories at CBC went on to apply the same principles to boxes of medicine.
And the boy who once sneaked onto the runway at Congonhas on his bicycle lived long enough to see the small company founded by his father become part of one of Brazil’s largest pharmacy groups.
Ronaldo Carvalho is survived by his sons, Flávio and Paulo Carvalho, who are connected to Grupo DPSP’s board.
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