Discover Mexico

By Andrés Burzaco Malo, Director General ANEMEX, Mexico

The Funeral Industry in Mexico is characterized by a very rich and rooted tradition of honoring the dead. This can be most easily seen in the Day of the Dead festivities that take place all throughout Mexico on November 2nd. In Mexico that day is a national holiday and there are no schools or banks. The importance of this is that the choices a family makes regarding its final destination takes this into consideration. In rural places long standing traditions are followed more closely while in the urban space, innovation is easier to encounter.

Mexico has 130 million people in its own borders, making it the 10th most populated country, and close to 25 more million living abroad, mainly (more than 95%) in the USA, which makes it the country, not at war, with the most repatriations in the world, with over 6,5 thousand in 2019.
Mexico is the 13th country in the world by land mass, the 15th by GDP (72nd by GDP per Capita). It has an average age of 29 years, a life expectancy of 75 years and a mortality rate of 6‰. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, there were 735 thousand deaths, that number was 1,13 million in 2021. Preliminary data in 2022 show us that the rate is returning to pre pandemic numbers.
In the funeral Industry Mexico has 4,200 Registered Funeral Homes (and quite a few unregistered ones).

Anemex was founded in Mexico 21 years ago. Its initial driver was to help collective groups have dignified funeral services. Mainly with registered funeral homes, in an affordable way.
Most people in Mexico are economically challenged and live paycheck to paycheck and are not subject to credit. Anemex created a subscription type funeral service for companies so that its employees (and in many cases their families) have a funeral service included as an employee benefit (like a dental plan, but in our industry). This perk was greatly appreciated by employees and unions, and soon the insurance industry decided to start including our services to those individuals or groups who acquired life or medical insurances with them as a loyalty benefit. After them some finance and banking institutions and some commercial chains started including this service as a loyalty program. Today Anemex has 14.5 million affiliates in Mexico under these different programs. Last year we gave around 10,000 full funeral services and countless orientation and planification orders.

If you would like to learn more about funeral industry in Mexico, we invite you to read whole article in the autumn issue of THANOS magazine - you can read online at pages 10-11

Read online THANOS magazine