Milicic, one of Argentina's largest earthmoving contractors, splits its order book evenly between Vaca Muerta oil and copper mining, and is betting on a mining buildout its CEO says Argentina's own construction sector cannot fully supply.
The Rosario-based contractor, founded 52 years ago by CEO Marian Milicic's father, Carlos, employs about 2,500 people across Argentina and Peru and runs close to 1,500 pieces of construction machinery. Its work spans earthmoving, civil works and pipeline laying for the private sector. "We're builders; that defines us," Milicic said in an interview on the La Fábrica podcast.
The firm's edge, she said, is its owned fleet, which she calls the largest pool of owned earthmoving equipment of any Argentine company, placing it early in the project chain. "In general, we're the first to arrive," she said, summing up the commercial logic bluntly: "you have to sell what the client wants to buy."
An Owned Fleet and a 50/50 Book
Revenue splits 50% mining and 50% oil and gas, a balance Milicic said has looked different in other periods but holds today. The company has always moved behind the sectors that pull investment: first the agro-export ports of Rosario, then energy and petrochemicals, and today Vaca Muerta and copper.
Scale is measured in machinery. Of the roughly 1,500 units, the firm's largest haul 100 tonnes and cost more than $1 million each. The big-mining machines, 300 to 400 tonnes, run between $3 million and $5 million apiece, a category Milicic does not yet operate.
The workforce is spread across the production map: headquarters in Rosario, a base in San Juan for the past 15 years, another in Añelo, a commercial office in Buenos Aires and a base in Lima. About 80 engineers work for the firm, and 10 managers report to the CEO.
Keeping that iron running is part of the business. Milicic described jobs that demand total availability: equipment operating at 4,500 meters of altitude, around the clock, with no calendar breaks. "There's no Christmas, no New Year, and that has to keep working," she said of operations at mines such as Veladero, a major gold mine in San Juan province.
From Catamarca Copper to the Tanks of Punta Colorada
The relationship with mining goes back decades. Milicic started in 1995 as a subcontractor at Bajo de la Alumbrera, Argentina's first large copper project, and stayed 25 years, until the mine closed. That Catamarca district is now reviving through MARA, the plan by Glencore, the Swiss mining and commodities group, to develop the Agua Rica copper deposit using Alumbrera's existing facilities.
In oil, the firm is one of the players on VMOS (Vaca Muerta Oil Sur), the pipeline carrying crude from the basin to Punta Colorada in Río Negro province. "We did the earthworks and the tank foundations," Milicic said of the terminal: the tank farm of six 120,000-cubic-meter tanks the contractor is building alongside U.S. engineering firm CB&I, within a $260 million package executed by AESA (A-Evangelista S.A.), YPF's engineering and construction subsidiary.
She reached for a football image, saying each crude storage tank holds the capacity of a soccer stadium. And she sized up the whole: it is, she said, the largest infrastructure project under way in Argentina today.
On the mining map, Milicic placed Vicuña, in San Juan, as the copper project leading the new wave; she mentioned Los Azules and Taca Taca, the latter in Salta; pointed to Santa Cruz as the main exporting province for its gold deposits; and described Veladero as the largest single producing project. Lithium in the north, she added, is led by Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining major.
Working at Risk, Against the Clock
Winning a job, she explained, is work done up front and at risk. Before any award, the firm supports the project's maturation with estimates and engineering, with no guarantee of taking the contract. "We have to be one of the players at that table," she said of client relationships, accepting the rule of the game: once the bid is in, "we can win or lose."
When the investment closes because financing appears (a structure that in Argentine mining now leans on the RIGI, Argentina's Large Investment Incentive Regime), the pace changes abruptly. "It's overnight, and there's no time," she said. That is why contracts are short: "we have contracts that last six, seven, eight months."
The flip side of operating in Argentina is tight margins. "Margins are tight," she acknowledged, attributing it to demanding clients and a fast-changing context. Long contracts, she added, carry adjustment formulas that "don't always reflect your cost variation," a mismatch that turns critical when every macro variable moves at once. The firm acknowledged running into trouble on jobs during the last change of rules, though there is usually room to negotiate with clients who need their supplier to survive.
Local Capacity Falls Short
The central point of the interview was scale. "Mining in Argentina has already started, big mining has already started," she said, then marked the limit of local supply: "if all of Argentina's construction companies pooled together, the capacity still wouldn't be enough."
The reason, she said, is that "it's another scale; it's not a matter of gathering a lot of small players." That gap explains the arrival of firms from Chile, Peru, Australia and Spain that move earth for big mining worldwide and already operate in the country.
Milicic's own move into Peru, four years ago and now on its third project there, worked as a mirror of that difference. "It's not the mining we'd been doing here," she said: big copper mining, she explained, "is a whole ecosystem" that forces a contractor to solve housing, transport, food and workforce training on top of earthmoving. Peru, where engineers with large-scale mining experience are plentiful, showed her the real size of the business Argentina aspires to.
Demand, in her reading, has no reverse gear: "the world needs copper," she said, with "no substitute," and artificial intelligence pushing the projection higher. She also read a social shift: "never has there been as much consensus as now that mining can be a development driver for Argentina."
The other constraint is labor. Milicic praised the Instituto Vaca Muerta, the training center backed by YPF, and urged that the model be replicated in mining: "you have to invest in training." Without local training, she warned, big miners end up poaching technicians from the small and mid-sized firms (PyMEs) that cannot match their salaries. On her own role, she was blunt: "I don't want to be the bottleneck of the organization."