Thursday, October 20, 2005
Cemex - A Model World Leader
Economist (Oct 15, '05) profiles Cemex and its boss Lorenzo Zambrano. It ponders how Cemex can act as a model for entrepreneurs in middle-income countries like India or Brazil to become world leaders in their businesses:
Other Mexican companies have presences abroad—Bimbo, a breadmaker, peddles its slices elsewhere in Latin America, and Carlos Slim, Mexico's richest man and helmsman of Téléfonos de Mexico, the country's telecoms incumbent, owns companies in the United States, such as CompUSA, a computer retailer. But what distinguishes Mr Zambrano from Mr Slim and other Mexican tycoons is that he has not merely used a fortune built up in Mexico to make investments elsewhere, but has developed a Mexican firm into a world leader. Mexico is no longer even Cemex's most important market. Although early on Cemex took advantage of its pricing power in Mexico, from the beginning Mr Zambrano had a focus on accountability and efficiency that led him naturally beyond Mexico's borders. The lessons for other entrepreneurs in middle-income countries, such as India or Brazil, are clear—in the long run, good management will serve much better than crony capitalism. Nonetheless, it is striking how few chief executives have managed to pull off Mr Zambrano's trick of turning a small company in a poor country into a big company in many rich countries.
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