Sun, Jul 21, 2002 page11

• Mexican tycoon excels in man's world

  SHAKERS AND MOVERS Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala may have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she is deceptively astute at business management

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The newest member of this country's old-boy billionaires' club displays a penchant for frosted lipsticks and high heels.

  Don't be fooled by the facade. Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala fought a staunchly macho Mexican society in transforming herself from poor little rich girl to tycoon. Once unemployed, she now manages a billion-dollar family fortune built on beer money, having stunned the impenetrable corporate clique two years ago when she acquired a 20 percent stake in Mexico's media giant, Televisa.

  

  Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala is on ``Forbes'' magazine's list of the wealthiest people in the world.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  Since then, Aramburuzabala, whose face glows with meticulous strokes of makeup, has been named to Forbes magazine's list of the wealthiest people in the world. To hear her talk about demolishing barriers that have kept Mexican women from the top of the corporate ladder, she is as confident in boardroom battles as in a cotton-candy-colored miniskirt.

  "In the mentality of corporate Mexico, women are considered synonymous with brainless," said Aramburuzabala, in an interview from her 25th-floor office overlooking the mansions and shopping malls on the northwest edge of the capital.

  "I had three things going against me when I started out. I am a woman; I was young with no experience; and I was Daddy's girl."

  Aramburuzabala, 39, a divorced mother of two, is an heiress to Grupo Modelo, one of Mexico's largest publicly traded companies, and now one of its most powerful directors. The brewer of Corona beer, Grupo Modelo was co-founded by her grandfather, a penniless Basque immigrant, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Her father, Pablo, helped make Corona the best-selling imported beer in the US, and the fifth-most-popular in the world.

  While Daddy worked, his daughter enjoyed the privileges of wealth. At 19, she married a successful business executive who was eight years older. She finished an accounting degree at the elite Technological Institute of Mexico. After she graduated, she began having children.

  "Basically our lives were focused on family, not on work outside our homes," said Patricia Flores, who has been one of Aramburuzabala's best friends since college.

  Flores, the daughter of a former general director of Quaker Oats in Mexico, had also married at a young age and had the first of her four children before she turned 20. The women were drawn to each other by their similar situations. There remains something similar about their vivacious and unabashedly feminine ways.

  Flores said she and Aramburuzabala even dressed their children alike. She recalled trips downtown to see Santa at Christmas and vacations at Disney World. Sometimes the women would sneak away from their families for massages at a day spa or scandalous shopping sprees.

  "If you would have asked me 10 years ago whether Mariasu would be doing what she is doing now," Flores said of her friend, "I would say no way."

  Defining moment

  Aramburuzabala's father died of cancer at 63 and everything changed. He left no male heirs, only a wife and two daughters. None of them had read a spreadsheet, much less annual reports.

  Still grieving, the women took stock of all that had been left them, and struggled to figure out how to save it.

  Aramburuzabala recalled their situation in a speech last March at Harvard Business School. "It seemed we were a big pie to eat," she said with a wry grin, "and everybody wanted to eat it, by the way."

  Mostly, she said, what many of her father's former business associates wanted was to move her and her mother and sister out of the way. "The world caved in on us," she said in the recent interview. "Friends, enemies, boyfriends -- everyone wanted control. Less than a month after my father died, we had people coming to tell us that he had left them in charge, and that they were going to manage things for us."

  Instincts for self-preservation took over, Aramburuzabala said. The offers for help and advice sounded to her like the promises of used-car salesmen. She consulted her mother, who was still in deep mourning, and sister, who was pregnant. She decided, she said, not to pursue control of the company -- her brother-in-law had been named general director -- but she was determined not to lose any of the family stake in Grupo Modelo.

  On the day her youngest son started kindergarten, she started work. "I could have sat home eating popcorn and watching TV," she said. "But my mother, my sister and I decided that we were not going to put our fate in anyone else's hands."

  From an office about the size of a supply closet, she followed the only advice her father had passed on to her. She read the company statutes, its investment agreements and all its outside contracts. With the help of her brother-in-law, she made alliances within the company to keep control of her father's seats on the board of directors and his shares in Grupo Modelo.

  Still, without a victory of her own, she was hardly taken seriously by senior members of the board. "Most of them thought that because I was a woman I would get tired of work," she said. "They thought I was just playing the little businesswoman, and that after a while I would go back home."

  To prove herself, she took on the company's most difficult challenges. Two of its yeast companies had gone bankrupt, and directors at Grupo Modelo wanted to sell them. Aramburuzabala offered to make the companies profitable within a year. It would be, she said, her MBA.

  "I had an education, so I knew how to think," she said. "What I didn't have was experience."

  She got the experience from the top to the bottom of the yeast companies. She reduced payrolls and merged divisions. She got rid of corrupt accounting managers and union leaders. She oversaw purchasing, and she helped managers on the overnight shift supervise production.

  A year later, the companies were back in the black. The board, she said, seemed pleasantly surprised. And next they assigned her to help lead negotiations to sell a 50.2 percent noncontrolling stake of Grupo Modelo to Anheuser-Busch.

  It was a deal worth about US$1.6 billion. Aramburuzabala's family is believed to have made about US$500 million. But the deal won her something even more valuable: the respect of her associates. In 1996, she became vice chairwoman of Grupo Modelo.

  Aramburuzabala says she has become extremely comfortable hobnobbing as the only woman in a corporate league dominated by men. But she still delights in girlish fun. Dinners with her, her friends say, are often filled with family talk and jokes and gossip.

  Flores recalled a trip that she and Aramburuzabala took to Paris last year. They spent almost all of their time eating and shopping. On the last day, they realized that they had not seen a single monument or museum during the visit.

  What would they tell their friends?

  On the taxi ride to the airport, the travel buddies asked their driver to stop at several of the most important tourist attractions and take photos of them in front of each one.

  "We were as silly as 15-year-olds," Flores said. "But we had so much fun."
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