The Founder
Ignacio Moena
I didn't learn cross-border trade in a classroom. I learned it doing it — on the ground, in the language, with my own capital and reputation on the line.
I spent a year in Shanghai building a market for Chilean wine from zero, and years running real trade between China and Latin America — importing a container a month, dealing directly with Chinese factories, learning exactly how they quote, how they operate, and where a deal quietly breaks before the money's gone.
That's the experience that matters now. Every U.S. importer leaving China is walking into the same gap I've lived on both sides of: you need someone who knows how a Chinese supplier really behaves and how a Mexican or Taiwanese operation actually runs. I've sat on the buyer's side of deals that could have gone badly and didn't — because I knew what to watch for. That's the whole job.
Apolo is the firm I built out of that. Not a broker passing along factory names — a guide who's crossed this ground before. And because a second business gives Apolo its footing, it's built patiently, on the right clients, without the pressure to overpromise.
The experience behind it
Shanghai
Multi-industry
China ↔ LatAm
Building a market in China
Market entry for Chilean wine from the ground up — HORECA sales, tastings, education, distribution. Living proof of what it takes to make a foreign product wanted in a market that's never heard of it.
China ↔ LatAm
Multi-industry
China ↔ LatAm
Real trade, a container at a time
Importing plywood from China to Chile on a recurring basis — and the day a factory took the deposit and couldn't produce. A backup pipeline was ready, and the order closed anyway. Scars are credentials.
Multi-industry
Multi-industry
Multi-industry
The same skill, across categories
Data center, wine, wood and panels, solar and energy, seafood and produce, industrial machinery. The product changes; qualifying the other side, structuring the terms, and managing the operation do not.
Languages
Multi-industry
Multi-industry
Three markets, in their own words
Native Spanish and fluent English — the two rooms most of our clients live between — plus Mandarin fundamentals and real operational fluency from a year on the ground in China.
The China exit runs through two rooms. We speak both.
Español
Español
Español
The operations floor in Mexico
Native Spanish for the plants, the people, and the day-to-day of getting product made right in Juárez, Monterrey, or Tijuana.
中文
Español
Español
The ownership that built them
Mandarin fundamentals and real operational fluency in China — for the Taiwanese and Chinese ownership behind so much of the nearshore capacity.
Where We Stand
