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Javier Cano and Joan Esteve (Photo: Esteve).
 23.10.2019

ESTEVE Appoints Javier Cano as New Member of the Board of Directors

The General Shareholders' Meeting of ESTEVE has approved, effective 1 November, the incorporation of Javier Cano as a new member of the Board of Directors to replace Joan Esteve. Since 2012, all discovery and preclinical development key units of Esteve are located at the Barcelona Science Park with the latest infrastructure and technology in a top-level academic and scientific environment in Spain.

 

Joan Esteve (1944) is member of the Esteve family’s second generation of entrepreneurs. Since 1971, his career has been closely linked to the company’s success. He was initially in charge of ESTEVE’s international growth and was subsequently on the Group’s joint executive management team, serving as the Chairman from 2012 to 2018. A few months ago, Mr. Esteve announced his intention to progressively withdraw from positions of responsibility at ESTEVE and hand over his spot on the Board of Directors to Javier Cano.

Born in Barcelona in 1970, Javier Cano is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA from INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), where he graduated with honors. He has more than 20 years of experience, the last 12 of which have been spent in the insurance industry working for Cigna, a leading health services company with more than 165 million clients and over $132 billion in revenue. In Cigna, he was European General Manager and, most recently, COO (Chief Operations Officer) for the global expatriate insurance business, leading customer care, clinical and network teams in 11 service centers in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Before joining Cigna, Javier Cano was a consulting partner at Oliver Wyman. In 2000 he ventured into the then-nascent e-commerce industry, working for MercadoLibre.com, the largest e-commerce company in Latin America, with over 267 million registered users. Well aware of how important digitization is in every industry, Javier Cano has proactively updated himself by taking several immersion courses in Artificial Intelligence and other exponential technologies at Stanford, MIT, and Singularity University.

He is currently developing his own personal project in the field of insurance. An ardent enthusiast of the start-up ecosystem, he is an active angel investor.