The Grupo BEL founder says the group’s 25-year story is about more than growth. From a factory floor in Benedita to engineering for space missions, he hopes it shows what can be built through hard work, trust and the right values.
Marco Galinha did not set out to build a group of more than 80 companies. At 20, when he started the software business that would become the starting point for Grupo BEL, he had “one customer, one problem to solve and a month to get to the end of it”.
What he did have, he says, was a rule he has never broken: “What the business earns goes back into the business.” Grupo BEL, founded in 2001, now employs more than 3,000 people and sells products in over 100 countries. “I never planned the size,” he says. “I planned the next step, and then I took it.”
The story began in Benedita, a town he remembers for its workshops and factories. Before founding his own company, he worked on the factory floor at cutlery maker ICEL, filing knives. There, he says, he learned what a product really costs and developed a respect for the people who make it. Today he is the majority shareholder of the same factory, and its knives are sold around the world. “Of everything I have done, that is the circle I am proudest to have closed,” he says.
His own beginnings were not easy. He says his father lost a factory after the revolution. Galinha, the youngest of eight siblings, was studying computer engineering when his father died, and was left paying for his own studies. He describes the loss as the disappearance of the most important structure in his life, but says he tried to see it as a reason to change direction rather than give up.
The opportunity came at a moment of uncertainty. As the millennium approached, companies feared their computer systems would fail because of the “Y2K” bug. Galinha worked long hours developing software and helping businesses prepare. “I had no family capital and no political connections,” he says. “I had only one argument available to me, which was to deliver.”
Competition took hold of him before business did. As a young mountain-bike racer, he became a national champion, and he remembers the sport’s uncompromising logic: second place meant being the first loser. The same drive followed him into business.
Today Grupo BEL’s companies range from logistics and distribution to industry, media and space engineering. From the outside, he admits, those fields may seem unrelated. His test for whether a business belongs in the group is whether the work is difficult, whether the right people are already there and whether it can be kept for decades. “We do not buy balance sheets, we join teams,” he says. “We are not a fund with an exit date. We build to keep.” Knowledge developed in one company helps another. He calls Grupo BEL “a university of knowledge”.
Logistics gives the group an everyday presence across Portugal. BEL Distribuição was created in 2004, and the group later expanded through acquisitions including food and beverage distributor SDT, the Poupança cash-and-carry business and VASP, the Portuguese press distributor. The group says its network reaches more than 50,000 points of sale and makes 120,000 deliveries a day. It is quiet, constant work: goods need to reach shops, cafés and customers whether or not the day brings a crisis. Galinha expects software and artificial intelligence to make these businesses more efficient and to change the nature of the work, and believes technology can create new value if people choose to use it well.
That conviction is visible in the group’s fleet. Grupo BEL began electrifying its distribution vehicles at the end of 2013 and now runs around 350 electric vehicles, about 70% of them charged with the group’s own solar power. Used batteries are given a second life in backup power systems rather than scrapped. The group is Tesla’s largest corporate customer in Portugal.
Galinha is an outspoken admirer of Elon Musk. He remembers discussing Tesla in 2012, when the company looked risky and was still burning cash. He saw something in the cars that others had not yet seen, he says, but what convinced him was the work behind the vision: the willingness to build, to test and to keep going. He also recognises the personal cost of that kind of leadership. He too has slept in his own companies. “That’s not a good life,” he says.
The group’s most ambitious frontier is space. Galinha says he was drawn to it as a child, looking up at the stars and wondering what was out there. In 2018, Grupo BEL invested in Active Space Technologies, a Coimbra-based engineering company whose small team was already winning work from demanding international customers. In space, he says, a supplier is not chosen because it is cheap or Portuguese. The parts have to work, every time, in places where no one can travel to repair them. “I did not invest in a fashion. I invested in a standard of work.”
Active Space does not build whole satellites. It makes components that must be extremely light, strong and reliable, and Galinha says its equipment is now at work across almost the entire solar system. The company is contributing hardware to the European Space Agency’s EnVision mission to Venus, due to launch in November 2031, and has secured an order for components for 340 satellites. Beyond that he discloses little, noting that customer confidentiality is part of the work. “There is a piece of Coimbra doing its job in silence,” he says. “I am proud of exactly that.” On the pressure of producing at scale, he is unambiguous: “We will never trade reliability for speed.”
For him, the value of the sector is not measured only in contracts. Space projects support work in machining, materials, testing and software, and give young engineers a reason to build their careers in Coimbra rather than leave for other European centres. “That matters more to me than any contract,” he says. He wants Active Space to become the first name a prime contractor thinks of when a component is “not allowed to fail”, while remaining in Coimbra and led by Portuguese engineers. That condition, he says, “is not negotiable”.
Portugal, he believes, has the talent but needs more scale and patience. There are excellent small companies but too few medium-sized ones. Growth will require private investors who are willing to wait, closer cooperation between universities and industry, and public procurement that chooses national suppliers when they are the best. He sees the country’s Atlantic position as an advantage, along with its links to Europe, Africa, Brazil and the United States. He once considered building up the group in the US, but says his attachment to Portuguese culture and history kept him here.
Europe, he adds, could learn from SpaceX’s tempo and from the courage to accept that a failed test is still a test. “We do not need to copy everything. We need to copy the pace.” If a meeting with Musk ever happens, he would want to talk about manufacturing: how to produce thousands of units to a standard where failure is not an option, and where a European supplier of Active Space’s size could contribute.
He is just as willing to speak plainly about what has not gone to plan. Asked which decision taught him the most, Galinha names Grupo BEL’s investment in Global Media. “It has been far harder than I expected,” he says. “We are working to turn it around.” He intends to be judged on how that story ends, not how it began.
Ambition, in his view, cannot excuse a lack of transparency. A company can grow by cutting corners, he says, but the shortcuts eventually catch up with it. As Grupo BEL expanded, it invested in governance, compliance and sustainability before these were fashionable subjects. He does not speak of the group as an asset that belongs solely to him. He describes it as the employees’ “first house” and says decisions now carry the weight of thousands of families. “I share a vision,” he says, “and we are all, somehow, the owners of this project.”
At the 25-year mark, he wants Grupo BEL to become more solid, more international and more specialised. By its 30th anniversary, he hopes it will be producing more for the world from Portugal, with a new generation of managers leading the day-to-day work. The question he now asks himself is: “Will this still be standing, and still be useful, when I am no longer in the room?” If someone else is leading Grupo BEL in 25 years, he says, that would be a very good sign.
Success is not something he awards himself. “I don’t recognise myself as a successful person,” he says. He leaves that judgment to others. What he wants is good health, his family, and the chance to give his children the best education possible. He values the fact that in Portugal he can still have a coffee without layers of security around him.
When he imagines the group’s 50th anniversary, he hopes people will talk less about him and more about what remains: that a group born in Benedita, without inherited capital, gave work to thousands of families, kept a factory and a newspaper archive alive, sent Portuguese engineering into space and did it honestly.
Then he returns to the young people who may see their own difficult beginnings in his story. He remembers losing his father, seeing his family’s security disappear and spending more than 15 years without a holiday. He does not romanticise that struggle. What he wants is for children facing difficult circumstances to have an opportunity, and to believe they can build something of their own.
“I want to make the world a little bit better,” he says. It is an expansive ambition, but in Galinha’s words, it begins with something small: the next step, a kept promise, a component that works, a job that supports a family, or a young person who decides not to give up.