Negócios 

Having literally walked the stony path, and because José Teixeira believes that culture is the differentiating factor to make DST more competitive, he continues to mix factories with Vhils or Beckett and to offer philosophy and neuroscience courses to his employees, who keep collecting benefits in a group that is even going to provide a crèche for 70 children.

IDENTITY CARD

• Position: Chairperson of the DST group

• Place of birth: He was born on January 27th, 1960, in Braga

• Educational Background: Master’s in Civil Engineering, University of Minho

• Family: He is married to Ana Forte Fernandes and has two daughters - Bárbara (involved in the arts) and Maria Teresa (Industrial Engineering and Management)

WHY HE HAS GONE DOWN

After making his debut on the list of the 50 Most Powerful in 2022 in 35th place, which happened due to DST’s unique position in the race to acquire Efacec, José Teixeira has been losing prominence in the Negócios ranking. With the deal to buy the state-owned company having fallen through, it now failed to submit a tender for the first section of the Porto-Lisbon TGV. But the Braga group has kept its business power intact and is involved in ambitious projects.

Always buzzing with innovative ideas, at the group’s last Christmas party José Teixeira treated its more than three thousand employees to another “out of the box” novelty: DST weddings, offering one wedding a year to one of the employees at the group’s head office campus in Braga, which is a veritable open-air museum. And so it came to pass: last June 15th, with the boss paying for all the expenses, including catering, a DJ and even fireworks, for more than 100 guests, the first DST wedding took place, that of one of its female employees.

When asked about the reasoning behind this unlikely benefit, José Teixeira replied: “Good does good, and doing good has an absolutely incredible return. Creating experiences that stay with people for life, fulfilling dreams that are difficult to realize is a pleasure, it is happiness, it’s an opportunity for those who do it and for those who receive it. And in this calculation between those who receive and those who do, when it’s good you’re doing well, those who receive the most are those who give,” he concluded.

This is just one of more than 70 benefits for those who work for the DST group, many of which are completely unheard of in the Portuguese business world, such as hairdressing, manicure, and minor plastic surgery services, including treatment for wrinkles and Botox injections.

Courses, psychology, painting classes, laundry facilities...

Plus: postgraduate courses in Philosophy and Management, training in Neuroscience and Mental Health, a health center with free general medicine, dental and psychology consultations, football, tennis and paddle courts, a fitness circuit, a disco and various rest and leisure areas.

There are also compulsory reading breaks during working hours, and the employees have access to a library containing thousands of literary works. And trips to the theatre. And a restaurant. And free painting classes during working hours. At the end of last year, the group transformed a storage space on its campus into a communal laundry room for all its employees to use.

Meanwhile, in a broken-down building from the start of the last century, located in the sports complex on the DST campus, a crèche will be set up for the children of the group’s employees. “This crèche will accommodate 70 children, aged 0 to 3, and will have a pedagogical programme that has been carefully studied and which caters to today’s actual educational needs,” José Teixeira told Negócios.

“Having a crèche here changes everything in terms of the paradigm of having children: if our workers know that they can have children, come to work and leave their children here, without having to worry about finding a crèche, without having to spend a single penny of their salary to be able to leave their babies here, well that is doing something that borders on giving someone the chance to have inner peace,” says the head of the group based in Braga.

The minimum wage at DST “is 870 euros net per month, which is higher than the amounts decreed by law,” plus “life insurance and health insurance,” emphasizes José Teixeira, who considers that “the goal of eradicating poverty is not just a mission for governments, but also for those employing in the private sector, that is, entrepreneurs.”

This leader started breaking stones at the age of 6

Leading the DST group since his father’s death in 2010, José Teixeira literally started breaking stones at the age of 6. Together with his three brothers who are shareholders and administrators - Joaquim, Avelino and Hernâni – they put hands to work in a small quarry founded by their father, Domingos da Silva Teixeira (DST), who supplied materials for the construction of the good old 1st May Stadium in Braga.

Born in the 1940s mining aggregates, the company later evolved into the engineering and construction sector, which is still the group’s “core” area to this day. With José at the helm, DST has accelerated its expansion in this century, becoming a powerful industrial and even cultural conglomerate.

Currently employing 3,326 people, of which 2,705 are in Portugal, it has dozens of companies in various areas linked to engineering and construction, the environment, renewable energies, telecommunications, real estate and “ventures”, having closed the last financial year with a turnover of 587 million euros, 110 million more than in the previous year. Of total turnover in 2023, almost 107 million euros were generated in foreign markets, particularly France, Monaco, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, now recently joined by Luxembourg.

Gets CP trains, loses 1st TGV train

Of the DST group’s activities over the last year, the most noteworthy have been the conclusion of the EDP new head office project in Lisbon, which had been underway for four years, the launch of the Portuguese satellite Aeros into space and 5G.Rural.

This latest project is the result of a consortium led by DSTelecom, which has the ambition, by 2026, of ensuring the implementation of a panoply of 5G-based use cases in remote areas of the Alentejo, in areas such as health, education, energy, agriculture, tourism, art and culture, through providing 5G coverage to more than 70,000 people in this region.

It is also leading two of the so-called Mobilizing Agendas under the PRR, with an aggregate investment of more than 450 million euros - one aims to build a modular housing cluster, the other to create an ecosystem for the electric battery industry.

There are two other positive facts and one negative aspect to highlight in the recent period of DST’s life: in a consortium with the French company Alstom, it won a tender to supply 117 electric railcar units to CP, for 746 million euros; and the consortium that together with DST and CaetanoBus, among others, won the tender to build the hydrogen buses that will run on Porto’s metrobus service, for 29.5 million euros. On the other hand, the consortium that includes Spain’s Sacyr, France’s NGE Concessions and Alberto Couto Alves did not submit its tender for the first section of the Porto-Lisbon high-speed line in time.

More than two thousand works of art dotted throughout its factories

Let us now return to DST’s 1.2 million square meter HQ campus, where more than 2,000 works of art are scattered among the huge factories, including the faces of José Teixeira’s parents sculpted by Vhils, which were joined on 1 June by another work by the artist, Light Maria, in honor of Maria do Alívio Gonçalves Teixeira, sister of the group’s board members.

Among other innovative cultural initiatives, such as “DST - alive in bookshops” or the “Listen to silence” series of events, José Teixeira continues to believe that culture is the differentiating factor to make the group more competitive, and he is one of the country’s biggest patrons. “Culture is the salvation of the economy.” ■