Agostino Rocca

Agostino Rocca (1895–1978), founder of the Techint Group of Companies. Agostino Rocca (1895 – 17 February 1978) was an Italo-Argentine businessman.

Life and times Agostino Rocca was born in 1895 in Milan. His family relocated to Rome early in his childhood, and he completed secondary school studies at the Collegio Militare di Roma. He enrolled at the Accademia Militare di Torino in 1913, but left to enroll in the Italian Army at the outset of World War I. During the war he saw combat against Austro-Hungarian forces. Following the war, he enrolled in the Politecnico di Milano in 1921 to study engineering and married Maria Queirazza.

Rocca began as an engineering apprentice at Dalmine, a steel maker, in 1923. He later became a financial advisor, and worked for a number of prominent Italian firms, mainly in the manufacturing sector. He was made part of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), the centerpiece of the Mussolini regime's corporate state, in 1933, and joined the body's military industries committee, becoming a member of the board of directors of a number of venerable names in Italian industry and engineering, notably Dalmine and Ansaldo, and overseeing their conversion into defense contractors ahead of hostilities leading to World War II.

Awarded a contract to build a 1,600 km (1,000 mi) gas pipeline from Comodoro Rivadavia to Buenos Aires in 1949 by President Juan Perón, Techint became a leading government contractor during Perón's ambitious infrastructure program. Establishing subsidiaries in Brazil (1947), Chile (1951), and Mexico (1954), the company purchased a majority stake in Dalmine (Rocca's erstwhile employer), in 1954, and opened its first seamless steel tube plant in Campana, the same year. Techint's Ensenada plant, in 1969, became the only Argentine manufacturer of cold rolled steel.

The aging industrialist transferred management of the company to his elder son, Roberto Rocca, in 1975, and died in Buenos Aires on February 17, 1978, at age 83. Techint was, by then, a conglomerate with 15,000 employees, two steel manufacturing facilities in Argentina and with international engineering and construction interests.