News From NewYorkBusiness.com
Cuomo asks HUD to block Starrett City deal
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson was urged to block the $1.3 billion sale of the Brooklyn apartment complex to an investment group led by David Bistricer.
Merck debt ratings cut over suits, patents
Fitch Ratings downgraded Merck and Co.'s ratings, citing a series of lawsuits related to Vioxx and the current or pending expiration of patents for several of the drugmaker's top selling drugs.
Judge gives go-ahead for Air America sale
SL Green Realty founder Stephen Green offered to buy the liberal talk radio network for $4.25 million last month.
Felix Sención, 38
Founder and Chief Executive
The Mundial Group
As a boy selling newspapers in his father's Washington Heights candy store, Felix Sención got an early education in running a business. In particular, he remembers the time he gave change for a $20 bill after the customer handed him a $10. " `We make pennies on all the newspapers,' " Mr. Sención recalls his father telling him after the customer returned the money. "That kind of experience helped me think: There has to be a bigger opportunity out there."
The opportunity was one he made himself. In 2002, taking what he learned as a sales executive in the multicultural department at the Daily News, Mr. Sención launched Fútbol Mundial--and convinced blue-chip advertisers to sign on.
Distributed inside Hispanic newspapers, the now monthly soccer title boasts circulation of over 1 million copies, making it the country's largest Spanish-language sports magazine. "People [in this community] were not reading sports magazines," he says. "We created a habit."
The combined rate card ad revenue for Fútbol Mundial and new offshoot Beisbol Mundial reached $7.5 million in 2006, up 30% from the prior year, according to Media Economics Group.
Mr. Sención has also recently launched the English language Fútbol Mundial USA, which runs inside USA Today's Sports Weekly, and he is rolling out boxing and auto-racing magazines.
"He found a different way of doing something," says former U.S. soccer manager Clive Toye. "And he reached millions of soccer fans in this country no one had reached before."