Lorenzo Hormisdas Zambrano Treviño (27 March 1944 – 12 May 2014) was a Mexican businessman and philanthropist. He took over Cemex, a regional cement company founded by his grandfather, and transformed it into one of the largest cement producers in the world by the time of his death. Zambrano also financed several cultural initiatives across Latin America and chaired, from 1997 to 2012, the board of trustees of the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM), one of the largest private universities in the region. He also co-owned Axtel, an important Mexican telecommunications company. Early years Zambrano was born on 27 March 1944 in Monterrey, Nuevo León, into a wealthy family composed by Lorenzo Hormisdas Zambrano Hellion and Alejandrina Treviño Madero. The family of his father had built a small fortune in the 19th century as entrepreneurs during the industrialization of their home city. His paternal great-grandfather, Gregorio Zambrano Guajardo, co-founded in 1854 the first textile mill in the region, Fábrica de Hilados y Tejidos de Algodón "La Fama". Likewise, his paternal grandfather, Lorenzo Hormisdas Zambrano Gutiérrez, founded Cementos Portland Monterrey (1920), a small Portland cement producer that profited from Monterrey’s reconstruction after the 1910 Revolution. Conversely, the family of his mother had been one of the most prominent and influential in the neighboring state of Coahuila but suffered significantly after the civil war. The Maderos, once prosperous miners, bankers, wine-makers and overall industrialists from Parras underwent harassment and persecution after Francisco I. Madero, the short-lived democratic president, died in a coup along with his brother Gustavo, Zambrano’s maternal grandfather. Zambrano completed his basic studies in private schools of Monterrey, but despite his wealth his upbringing was far from nonchalant. His grandfather died in a car accident at the age of 50, barely four years after merging his company with Cementos Hidalgo of the Brittingham family, and the Bittingham's longstanding accountant, Jesús Barrera Rodríguez, maneuvered over the Zambranos to overtake control of the business. To aggravate matters, while Lorenzo was studying high school at Missouri Military Academy, in the United States, his father died and the teenager precipitously found himself responsible for his mother and four younger siblings: Patricio, Hernán, Jorge and Nina. Confronting the situation, Zambrano opted to return to Monterrey and enrolled at the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM), where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1966. Shortly thereafter, he moved briefly to Palo Alto, California,