Telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim has announced his intention to launch a channel tailored to the Mexican audience in the United States.
The channel, called Nuestra Visión (“Our Vision” in English), will be provided by Publicidad y Contenido Editorial, a unit of the Slim-owned America Movil, which is the largest cellular phone company in Latin America.
“Nuestra Visión is focused on Mexicans, made by Mexicans and transmitted from Mexico,” the narrator says in a promotional video.
For Slim, a Mexican billionaire who has at times claimed the title of richest person in the world, the channel represents an opportunity to plant his flag in a large American television market.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., there were more than 11.7 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S. as of 2014, representing 28% of the country’s foreign-born population. The number swells to more than 35 million when including people with Mexican ancestry or Hispanic origin.
Nuestra Visión will compete against a pair of Spanish-language giants already operating in the U.S., Univision and Telemundo. On Tuesday, Univision, which boasts of reaching 97% of Hispanic households in the U.S., announced that it would expand its relationship with the Mexican media company Televisa.
In a joint statement, Univision and Televisa said that each would benefit “from a single, integrated focus on the Hispanic audience in the United States and the domestic Mexican audience, as well as from potential cost synergies from aligned content initiatives.”
Nuestra Visión will offer a variety of programming, including news, movies and sports. The channel will launch this year, when tensions between the U.S. and Mexico could be amplified. Slim had expressed concerns about President-elect Donald Trump during last year’s campaign, warning that the candidate’s economic policies could “destroy” the United States. Trump also accused Slim, who has a major ownership stake in the New York Times, of orchestrating unfavorable coverage of his candidacy.
But both men sang a very different tune last month after meeting for dinner at Trump’s resort in Florida. In a statement following the meal, Trump called it “a lovely dinner with a wonderful man.”
Those improved relations might give Nuestra Visión a distinct advantage over Univision, which has tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to land an interview with Trump.
