Born in the Paraguayan countryside more than three decades ago, the group took shape in the early 1990s, when brothers José Marcos, Paulo Sergio and Antonio Ivar Sarabia decided to meet a need they saw firsthand: technical training and quality inputs for rural producers in Alto Paraná.
Decades later, what was a single company became a group of seven businesses, now bringing together more than 1,000 employees in the production and sale of agricultural pesticides and fertilizers, and in grain storage. The expansion didn’t stop at Paraguay’s borders. Today the group also maintains a physical operation in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, in addition to its headquarters in Asunción — two countries, one single purpose of bringing innovation and sustainability to Latin American agribusiness.
This growth has a side that few see from the outside. It’s a family-owned group, with José Marcos, Paulo Sergio and Antonio Ivar Sarabia leading strategic decisions and directly involved in social responsibility initiatives, such as Fundación Sarabia, heir to more than two decades of work by CETEDI. Certifications such as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 show the group’s commitment to quality and sustainability, but what ultimately sustains this structure are the people who make it work every day, across two countries and in two different languages.
It was against this backdrop of scale — seven companies, two countries, decades of history and a deeply family-oriented culture — that Grupo Sarabia asked itself how to keep all employees connected to a single purpose, trained to the same quality standard, each speaking their own language.
When a company grows within a single country, people training can evolve organically — an in-person training here, a manual there, a hallway conversation that resolves a specific question. The problem can arise when that same company becomes a group operating in Asunción and Foz do Iguaçu: what works in one office doesn’t reach the office in the neighboring country the same way.
The root of the challenge wasn’t a lack of will to train people — that will always existed at Grupo Sarabia, present even in the more than two-decade legacy of Fundación Sarabia. It was the absence of a common system, capable of crossing the border between Portuguese and Spanish without losing consistency. A leadership program designed in Spanish, for example, rarely reached a Brazilian employee with the same impact, and the reverse was also true.
The result is that the problem wasn’t one of intention, it was one of systematization. What was missing was a single structure, capable of speaking two languages with the same quality, that would give the group a way to grow together, even while operating across different territories, cultures and languages.
Without a common platform, each Grupo Sarabia operation risks developing its own version of training, with slightly different pace, content and even values between the Paraguay team and the Brazil team. Small differences, repeated over the years, tend to accumulate into a fragmented corporate culture, even when everyone’s intent is the same.
Without structure, leadership also pays a price. Manager development programs, when applied manually and locally, tend to lose consistency as the group grows — and a group of seven companies across three countries needs leaders trained the same way, whatever language they speak day to day.
Main challenges identified:
These risks don’t appear all at once — they accumulate, year after year, as the group keeps growing in two countries. Faced with this, it became clear that Grupo Sarabia needed to answer a central question before moving forward.
The question guiding the journey is: how do you structure a single learning journey capable of speaking Portuguese and Spanish with the same quality, for employees from different operations and cultures?
Happmobi’s proposal starts from a simple principle: training shouldn’t depend on the country the employee is in, but rather on a common structure, built once and replicated with quality in each language. Instead of multiplying efforts — a training in Spanish here, an adapted version in Portuguese there — the logic becomes that of a single platform, natively multi-language, that sustains the same learning path on both sides of the border.
In Grupo Sarabia’s case, this logic applies directly to the reality of the group’s seven companies. Employees from operations in Paraguay and Brazil can access the same platform, with the same content and the same quality standard, with the possibility of interacting with one another — each one reading, watching and learning in their own language.
The traditional path would be to pull the employee out of the operation, the field, the factory floor, the sales team, to train them in an isolated moment, often only possible in one of the two countries. Happmobi’s proposal reverses this logic: learning enters the flow of work, accessible at any time, in either of the two languages, without taking the employee away from where they already are.
Technologies and resources that can support this design
To bring this proposal to life, some Happmobi platform features speak directly to Grupo Sarabia’s challenges:
With a bilingual structure sustaining the learning journey, Grupo Sarabia gains a more solid foundation to grow without losing the identity it built over more than three decades. This foundation is expected to translate into concrete gains in the day-to-day routine of the group’s seven companies.
With the bilingual foundation structured, Grupo Sarabia opens room to deepen this journey in the coming years, as new training needs arise across its seven companies, in Brazil and Paraguay.
In the end, what’s at stake isn’t just a platform capable of speaking two languages. It’s the possibility for a group born in the Paraguayan countryside, with deeply family roots, to keep growing without losing what has always defined it: people who learn together, even when they speak different languages. That’s the foundation Grupo Sarabia is building for the next thirty years of its history.
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Agribusiness
From the learner experience to manager governance: Happmobi’s features were designed to simplify L&D operations and accelerate learning results.