Gonzalo Gortázar presents the 2019 CaixaBank Women in Business Awards to regional winners

• CaixaBank's CEO has gathered the regional winners of the third edition of this Award.
• The winner of the national stage will be one of the Spanish representatives at the 2019 IWEC awards, held in New Delhi on 12 November.
• The CaixaBank Women in Business Award is part of the company's Wengage programme, which works to develop and promote the value of diversity and equal opportunities.

Gonzalo Gortázar, CaixaBank's CEO, has presented the awards to the regional winners of the 2019 CaixaBank Women in Business Award, which acknowledges the careers and talent of leading managers in Spain. The awards, now in their third annual edition, have been consolidated nationwide as a result of its support to entrepreneurial women.

In an event held with the regional winners, CaixaBank's CEO, Gonzalo Gortázar, highlighted the high standard of the submitted applications, congratulated the 14 female award winners and shared with them “the need to promote this type of initiatives in order to increase the visibility and recognition of women in business and their important role in the social and economic spheres.”

During his intervention, Gonzalo Gortázar explained, “Our commitment towards promoting equality and diversity is at the heart of CaixaBank's socially responsible banking model. Through the Wengage programme, in which the Women in Business Award is framed, CaixaBank wants to contribute to developing talent and equal opportunities. The company currently has 40.1% of women in management positions.”

The 14 regional winners of the 2019 Women in Business Award

The 14 winners of the CaixaBank Regional Departments vying to be the Spanish representatives at the 2019 IWEC Awards are:

• Western Andalusia: Arancha Manzanares Abásolo, Executive Vice-President of Ayesa Advance Technologies. It is a benchmark company in engineering, technology and consultancy in the industrial engineering, aeronautics and information systems sectors

• Eastern Andalusia and Murcia: María Dolores Ciurana Boadas, CEO of Faccsa. The company, founded in 1941, is dedicated to manufacturing meat products. It is today one of the 10 main Spanish companies in its sector

• Aragon and La Rioja: Cristina Forner González, Chair of the Board of Directors of Unión Vitivinícola, a company founded in 1972 with long-standing experience in La Rioja winegrowing. It currently exports to more than 120 countries

• Balearic Islands: María Antonia Llull Sánchez, Deputy Chair of Hipotels Hotels & Resorts, a group in the hotel and tourism sector, which has 30 establishments spread throughout Majorca, Lanzarote, Cádiz and Mexico

• Barcelona: Vanesa Martínez Chamorro, CEO of Carinsa (Industrial Fragrant Creations), a multinational industrial group dedicated to manufacturing and marketing fragrances, functional ingredients and additives for food, perfumery and cosmetics

• Canary Islands: María del Carmen Pérez Lara, Deputy Chair and CEO of Grupo Pérez Moreno, a group of businesses from the construction, property, tourism and services sectors

• Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura: Isabel Sánchez Serrano, CEO of Disfrimur, a Spanish company founded in 1997, dedicated to road freight

• Castilla León and Asturias: Verónica Pascual, CEO of ASTI Tech Group, a company dedicated to the sector of robotic engineering

• Catalonia: Anna Alzamora Planaguma, Manager of Alzamora Carton Packaging, a company specialising in manufacturing cardboard containers for its customers' packaging, active in various sectors

• Valencia: Ángela Pérez Pérez, CEO and Chair of the Board of Directors of Imegen, one of the leading laboratories in Europe specialising in oncogenetics, dedicated to research and development in human genetic diagnosis. It works in the field of precise personalised medicine, offering DNA analyses aimed at describing tumours and assigning the best treatment to each cancer patient

• Galicia: Emma Lustres Gómez, Administrator and Executive Producer of Vaca Films, an audiovisual and cinematographic production company for films aimed at both the national and international markets

• Autonomous Community of Madrid: Ana Victoria Ugidos Álvarez, CEO of Btsa Biotecnologías Aplicadas, a company specialising in manufacturing and preparing antioxidants. It is the first European company to manufacture natural vitamin E and to prepare natural antioxidants for the food industry

• Navarre: Laura Sandúa Escribano, Manager of Aceites Sandúa, a company dedicated to packaging and marketing edible oils, a benchmark in Spain in the development of a special frying-type oil that does not contain palm oil

• Basque Country and Cantabria: María Luisa Galardi Aduriz, CEO of Ondarreta Mesas y Sillas, a company founded more than 40 years ago and dedicated to manufacturing designer furniture. It currently exports over 40% of its production

The 2019 IWEC Awards

The winner of the CaixaBank Women in Business Award will be one of the Spanish representatives at the 2019 IWEC Awards, which will be held in New Delhi on 12 November, within the framework of the 12th International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge (IWEC), a worldwide network of female business leaders who nurture company ownership and cooperate on a global level with the goal of creating and distributing wealth in the business world.

The first edition of these awards took place in Barcelona in February 2007; subsequently, they were held in New York (2008), New Delhi (2009), Cape Town (2010), New York (2011), Barcelona (2012), Lima (2013), Stockholm (2014), Istanbul (2015), Brussels (2016), Seattle (2017) and Shanghai (2018).

In 2018 this international award ceremony acknowledged the careers of 48 businesswomen from 20 countries. The global turnover of the companies run by these women stands above 1.7 billion dollars and they employ more than 48,000 people.

CaixaBank, committed to diversity

The CaixaBank Women in Business Award has been consolidated nationwide as a result of its support to entrepreneurial women. It is part of CaixaBank's Wengage programme, which promotes the value of diversity and equal opportunities by carrying out a series of actions within the company aimed at promoting the talent and professional development of the women it employs. At the end of May 2019, the company had 40.1% of women in management positions.

In the external setting, CaixaBank promotes awards and conferences to increase the visibility of women in many areas of responsibility. This is precisely the goal of the CaixaBank Women in Business Award, which acknowledges the careers of women in the business world; or the WONNOW awards, in collaboration with Microsoft, which acknowledge the best students in the STEM fields (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). In addition, in 2018, CaixaBank promoted 70 conferences in Spain to raise awareness on the value of diversity and 11 Diversity Talks in the bank's international network.

Wengage is part of CaixaBank's Diversity Plan, which seeks to foster diversity in all its forms and reflects the socially responsible banking model, characterised by its commitment to the environment, its social approach and its contribution to the development of people and society as a whole.