An analysis of the posthumous asset class begins with a simple number: 8.7 billion. That’s the cumulative view count on the official YouTube channel for the late Mexican singer Juan Gabriel. Nine years after his confirmed death in 2016, his Spotify profile still retains 11.9 million monthly listeners, and his estate is launching a new posthumous album, Eterno, alongside a Netflix documentary. These are not the metrics of a fading legacy; they are the performance indicators of a remarkably durable, high-yield intangible asset.
The management of this asset portfolio is textbook. Iván Aguilera, the singer’s son and executor, speaks of “continuing the legacy” by releasing previously unheard material. This strategy serves a dual function: it services the existing client base (the fans) with new product, and it expands the brand's reach to new demographics through modern platforms like Netflix and TikTok, where the official audio for "Así Fue" recently trended to #1 globally. The business model is clear: monetize a finite archive to generate effectively infinite returns. The demand side of the equation appears bottomless. Candlelight tribute concerts sell out in places as distant from his core market as Fort Myers, Florida. Online search traffic for terms like `juan gabriel canciones` and `juan gabriel amor eterno` remains robust. There’s even a persistent, if statistically insignificant, sub-market of loyalists querying whether `juan gabriel esta vivo`. This is not merely fandom; it’s a form of brand adherence so profound that it rejects fundamental reality. From a purely analytical perspective, it represents the absolute pinnacle of customer retention.
It was during a routine data scrape of this cultural phenomenon that my query returned an anomaly. A second, entirely distinct data stream emerged, also indexed under the name "Juan Gabriel." This stream contained no mention of gold records or stadium tours. Instead, the keywords were "supply chain," "HVAC systems," "agronomic recommendations," and "ROI." This second individual is Juan Gabriel Succar, co-founder of a Mexican container farming company called Verde Compacto.
The dissonance is immediate and striking.
The Balance Sheet of a Song vs. a Shipping Container
A Tale of Two Value Propositions
Verde Compacto, under the leadership of Succar and his co-founder Jorge Lizardi, manufactures and sells a product called the Huvster Pro. It’s a refurbished 40-foot shipping container outfitted as a fully automated hydroponic farm. The company’s value proposition is built on tangible, quantifiable metrics. A single Huvster Pro unit consumes approximately 65 liters of water and 190 kWh of energy per day to produce, for example, around 100 kilograms of full-head lettuce per week. The monthly operating expenditure starts at roughly USD 2,000, factoring in nutrients, seeds, labor, and utilities.
The financial modeling is straightforward. The company partners with financing institutions in Mexico and the United States, offering terms of 36 to 60 months. The return on investment varies by market. In North America, where produce prices and logistics costs are higher, the payback period can be three to four years. (This timeline can be shortened by up to one full year when the "farm-to-table" marketing value is leveraged.) In Latin America, the ROI extends to a four-to-five-year horizon.
This is a clean, legible business. Its assets are physical: containers, LED lights, pumps. Its outputs are measurable in kilograms. Its value is calculated through discounted cash flow analysis. Even its "intangible" benefits, like sustainability marketing, are ultimately quantified by their ability to shorten the payback period. The system's components have defined lifecycles—LEDs last over 30,000 hours, while HVAC and pumps are rated for about 18,000 to 25,000 hours before replacement is required. To be more exact, 18,000 hours for some pumps. This is a business of predictable depreciation.
And this is the part of the analysis that I find genuinely fascinating. We have two entities named Juan Gabriel, each the face of a distinct enterprise. One built an empire on songs—assets that are infinitely replicable at zero marginal cost and which, evidently, appreciate in value after the creator’s death. The other is building a business on hardware—assets that are expensive to produce, have fixed capacity, and are guaranteed to depreciate over time.
A methodological critique is warranted here. The algorithm that powers a simple search query does not, and cannot, distinguish between these two value propositions. It sees a name and returns a jumble of mariachi music and hydroponic lettuce yields. It conflates the cultural economy with the agricultural economy. One Juan Gabriel’s work is the subject of a string quartet performance of `Querida` under candlelight. The other’s work is a refurbished steel box that requires periodic replacement of its filter cartridges.
The irony is that Juan Gabriel Succar, the entrepreneur, states that his system "adds intangible value, turning sustainability into a business strategy and a market advantage." He’s not wrong. But the scale of that intangible value is dwarfed by the brand equity of his namesake. A resort in Mexico found that its Huvster unit's direct production costs were about 10% higher than simply buying produce from a supplier. The value was found in supply security and the "farm-to-table experience." This is a rational, defensible business case. But it is not the same economic universe as the one in which 1.5 million TikTok videos are generated from a single concert recording, or where a posthumous album of B-sides is treated as a global cultural event.
The singer’s asset base is a collection of approximately 1,800 songs. These compositions are the source code for a multi-generational business that includes streaming royalties, licensing deals, documentaries, and a perpetual market for tribute acts. The entrepreneur’s asset base is a factory that can produce five to seven Huvster units per month. Both are viable enterprises. But only one of them has a name that resonates with an economic force equivalent to a law of nature. Only one of them is, for all intents and purposes, eternal.
###
Quantifying Eternity
###
My analysis suggests the core discrepancy lies in the nature of the asset itself. Verde Compacto sells a product whose value is defined by its operational efficiency and predictable decay. It is a solid, terrestrial business. The estate of Juan Gabriel, the singer, manages a portfolio whose value is defined by its emotional resonance and defiance of time. The market for hyper-local basil is subject to competition and technological disruption. The market for `Amor Eterno` is not. An algorithm may treat both Juan Gabriels as equivalent data points, but a balance sheet would tell a very different story. One sells a depreciating asset. The other sells immortality.
Reference article source：
