The Ramos Group, one of the Dominican Republic’s leading retailers, has a success story that began with eight employees and now has upwards of 10,000. There are also 36 stores in the country’s main provinces, of which 24 are superstores. But the real key to this success is “work, tenacity, persistence, and restlessness”, according to Roman Ramos Uria, the founding partner of La Sirena and the president of the Board of Directors of the Ramos Group, who by 1965, in the middle of the revolution, was in charge of La Sirena. This was considered to be a bad year by the commercial sector.
Don Roman Ramos Uria and his daughter Mercedes Ramos Fernandez described his success story during Dialogo Libre, the Diario Libre interview program hosted by the newspaper’s director, Adriano Miguel Tejada, with deputy director Ines Aizpun. Ramos Uria said that the Ramos Group would continue expanding, and gave the example of job creation that goes together with the growth. He added that it was impossible to add new stores without more employees. “So we are going to continue growing, and one of our greatest sources of satisfaction is to have the employees we have always had and always try to help them,” he stated. The nation’s largest employer also denied any sale to Walmart, but did not rule out the possibility in the future. One of the Group’s major innovations is the Aprezio stores, designed to serve the barrios, where Don Roman says: “People come every day to spend RD$500 or RD$300 pesos…”.