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FortunaDIRECTOR IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL OF CHROMA-PHARMA

María Cudeiro: “We women have impostor syndrome”

The cosmetics firm of Austrian origin was the seed of the first manufacturer of hyaluronic acid

Madrid 27 JUL 2019 - 11:01 CEST

She is not afraid of challenges. Quite the opposite. She seeks them out and needs them. In the home stretch of her fifth pregnancy, María Cudeiro (Tarragona, 1970), who holds a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Santiago de Compostela, has run the Austrian laboratories Croma-Pharma in Spain and Portugal since 2016. Previously she was sales and marketing director at Naos, which brings together the cosmetics firms Bioderma and Institut Esthederm, among others; head of Kamedis, and she also worked for Boehringer Ingelheim and Sanofi-Aventis. Despite this track record, focused above all on the pharmaceutical sector, in which she contributed to the launch of an innovative type of insulin, she dreamed of devoting herself to the cosmetics industry, in which she began to specialize a decade ago. "I studied Pharmacy for this," she says from her office, located in a space inside La Caixa's office building in Barcelona.

https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2019/07/26/fortunas/1564165088_498983.html

And when she refers to "this," she is talking about the world's first manufacturer of hyaluronic acid, which she joined three years ago after receiving a call from a headhunter, to whom she confessed that she was happy and had no need to change jobs. Even so, she decided to travel to Vienna to meet the owners of Crono-Pharma, a family business that manufactured the aforementioned product for third parties and which, four years ago, decided to sell part of the company and launch its own cosmetics brand. "I had four children, and I thought they would be reluctant, especially being in Central Europe, to have a female executive with such a large family," she explains. And when she asked why they had taken an interest in her résumé, they were clear: "Because once you finished your degree you had kept on training."