was done in-house . I said to myself , we need to change .”

Much of this sprawling infrastructure owes its existence to a self-built telco network , the second private largest in the whole country , which includes 130,000 phone lines and 10 data centres . Pemex was founded nine years before Mexico ’ s national telecoms company Telmex , and hence had to build its own communications capability from scratch . There was a time when people who worked for Pemex had two telephones at home : one from Pemex and the other one from Telmex . “ They got used to building their own technology infrastructure from the bottom up ,” Becerra Mizuno says , “ and they used to do it extremely well . But the world changed , and there are people that can do it better , because they specialise on that .”

Privatisation of these telco assets has proven vital in simplifying Pemex ’ s technological landscape , which Becerra Mizuno stresses needed streamlining with a degree of urgency . “ We needed to kickstart this immediately because we are working on the political clock , so we had to hit the ground running .”

Becerra Mizuno is referring to upcoming presidential elections which , depending on the result , could signal further reform at Pemex . The need to demonstrate the viability of the 2017 – 2021 Business Plan to any incumbent administration , and indeed the Mexican public , is therefore paramount .

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